Mechanical Engineer in the Making

Background

I grew up in Nepal, in the Himalayas, before coming to the United States to study engineering. For as long as I can remember, I've needed to know what's inside things. By around ten — just as I was learning Newton's laws — I'd already taken apart most of my toys, plus a flashlight, a radio, and even a TV, trying to see how simple equations actually came together to make things work.

That curiosity never left. I still build to understand, and I'm drawn to projects that make hardware feel interactive and human. One I'm developing now is a mechanical envelope — a rack-and-pinion mechanism that opens to reveal a letter inside, turning a simple message into something tactile.

Outside engineering, I play soccer and prototype ideas of my own.

The inventor I admire most is Nikola Tesla — not just for his vision, but for his conviction. He believed in his ideas when no one else did, and went on to shape modern life in ways still underrated today. That mix of imagination and self-belief is what I try to bring to my own work.

How I got here

I knew I wanted to be an engineer in high school. The curiosity I'd had as a kid had become deliberate: I wanted to design and build for a living, not just understand how things worked.

I started at San José State, where I joined the Formula SAE team. On a student-built race car, I saw how a complex machine comes together from many subsystems, and how a technical team organizes itself to keep a long build moving.

I later continued my mechanical engineering studies at BYU–Idaho for its hands-on, project-based approach.

What confirmed the field for me was a product design class. Working the full process — defining a problem, generating concepts, designing toward a solution — matched how I'd always thought: like an inventor looking for a better way to build something. It's a big part of why I'm drawn to product design today.

Where hardware meets software

What draws me most is where mechanical design meets electronics — devices that don't just move, but sense, respond, and feel intuitive to use.

The automated rat trap was my first taste of that. It was a team project, but as the most invested member I worked across nearly every part — CAD, research, the patent and proposal, and the bill of materials. Fitting a self-resetting mechanism into a briefcase-style case, with an electronic trigger driving a push-rod release, showed me how much care it takes to make the mechanical and electronic halves work together.

The Thermogate took that further — a full hardware-software project I built on my own. I generated the concept, designed it in SolidWorks, 3D printed the parts to tolerance, and programmed the Arduino, adding features to improve the user experience and leaning on AI throughout. The hardest part was packaging: fitting every component into the housing while keeping the enclosure as compact as possible.

This is where I see myself heading — automation, smart devices, and designs that put the user first.

Fabrication and the physical world

Designing a part on a screen is only half the job — the shop floor doesn't always match the model, and that gap is where I've learned the most.

The mailbox took a design all the way to a finished assembly: I laid it out on aluminum sheet, cut and bent it, then built and fastened a wooden stand. Turning a clean model into a square, finished product took more precision and patience than the drawing suggested.

The hanger pushed me into real machining. I made it on the mill and lathe at San José State, holding tolerances within 0.001 inch — deliberate work where a small mistake means starting the part over.

The lesson is simple: a CAD model doesn't automatically work on the shop floor. Material behaves differently than on screen, tolerances are harder to hold than they look, and the only way to get good at building real things is to build them.

Academic foundations

My coursework is where theory gets tested against real data. Three studies stand out.

In a thermodynamics study (ME-113), I examined waste heat recovery from industry, comparing heat exchangers, Organic Rankine Cycle systems, and regenerators against real industrial cases. What stayed with me was how much energy industry loses as heat — and how much can be captured and reused.

In a fluid dynamics experiment, I measured water flowing from a jar through a straw and calculated a Reynolds number of about 2828 — transitional flow, right at the edge between laminar and turbulent. My results came close to theory, and I accounted for the difference through head loss: a clear lesson in how real conditions diverge from ideal equations.

The study closest to how I think was CPR PulseMate (ME 380), a low-cost CPR device for untrained bystanders. The problem is simple: cardiac arrest can happen anywhere, and without the right equipment, someone can lose their life. Positioning it against the hospital-only LUCAS 3 — which runs $10,000–$20,000 — set clear cost and usability constraints to design within. It's the kind of problem I want to keep solving: making capable engineering accessible to more people.

What I'm working toward

I'm looking for roles in product design, automation, additive manufacturing, and mechanical engineering more broadly — places where designs are tested against reality, not just reviewed on a screen.

I'm open to internships or entry-level work, and to either building end-to-end on a small team or contributing to a larger engineering effort. What matters most is the chance to keep learning alongside a strong, positive team that takes its craft seriously.

I'm based in Rexburg, Idaho, and open to relocation. If you're building something that values precision and real curiosity for how things work, I'd like to be part of it.

Experience

Most of what I know how to do, I taught myself through projects. Internships and formal roles taught me the other half — how to work within a system, communicate across teams, and make sure the work lands the way it's supposed to.