Sydney Joseph started her college search confident that she wanted to study engineering. She was also secure in her decision to pursue that career at Ohio State University.
However, after wandering away from her Wake Forest tour and running into Assistant Engineering Professor Dr. Kyle Luthy, she enrolled at Wake Forest instead.
“I think initially, it was a really good thing to know that teachers are here and able to talk to us and get to know us on an academic and personal [level],” Joseph said. “That’s what I got from the interaction with him initially.”
Joseph has found this support from professors and students in the engineering department. Due to the smaller class sizes, Joseph explained that she has gotten to know her classmates, who have quickly become close friends.
With most of their classes at Wake Downtown, Joseph and her friends have developed a carpool system that allows them to connect outside of the classroom.
“It’s been really fun,” Joseph said, “because we often have great experiences driving and seeing things and talking about things and having time to decompress or to hype each other up before projects or talks or things like that.”
A lot of work in the engineering department is collaborative, and Joseph is currently working on her capstone project with three other students. As a team, they are creating a medicine dispenser system that helps manage medications for individuals 65 years old and older.
She shared that her project has allowed her to connect with the wider Winston-Salem community.
“It’s been really empowering and enlightening and just really fun to interact with patients, the doctors and geriatric care workers,” Joseph said.
Alongside working closely with other students, Joseph has maintained close relationships with professors in the engineering department. She explained that Dr. Erin Henslee has served as a mentor figure for her during her time at Wake.
“She’s given me the opportunity to be featured on multiple papers, and has taken me to multiple conferences or funded my experience at multiple conferences to get my name out in the field,” Joseph said. “She’s really elevated me, and as a woman of color, it’s really important to just feel elevated.”
She shared that Henslee’s guidance and support helped her make decisions about what she wants to pursue after graduation. Joseph will work towards a PhD in biomedical engineering at the Virginia Tech – Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Graduate Program. She hopes to pursue a career in non-invasive medicine.
“I think the possibility [of making] a change is something that’s really exciting,” Joseph said.
With her sights set on continuing her education, Joseph said that she feels that, even though she has almost completed her undergraduate degree, she has a lot left to learn.
“I truly believe in the motto that you never stop learning,” Joseph said. “There’s somebody who wrote it way more eloquently than I just said it, but I truly believe that in every experience I have and every class I go to, I’m learning something new.”
