“I had it in my head I was done with school,” says Peter Schwarzenberg ’16, recalling his mindset back when he was a senior. “I had a job signed in Seattle at an aerospace company. I had an apartment signed.”
But he’d also spent much of his senior year working on an independent research project at the Baker Institute for Entrepreneurship, Creativity, and Innovation. And the night he and his partner got their prototype of a portable IV device to actually work, he started rethinking the done-with-school plan. “I realized I really liked making new things.”
In this episode of Rossin Connection, Schwarzenberg talks about his 11th-hour switch to research and the new technique he developed with advisor and assistant professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics Hannah Dailey. It was that work that made him one of just 10 students selected from across the country for the Institute of International Education’s Graduate International Research Experiences (IIE-GIRE) program. He spent seven months validating the technique on animal models at the renowned Musculoskeletal Research Unit (MSRU) at the University of Zurich in Switzerland (right).