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How to Create a Design Portfolio That Drastically Improves Your Job Prospects
Some things are better shown than said. Professor Chris Mattson explains that a portfolio doesn't just claim you have skills—it makes them obvious through compelling, visual evidence. For engineers, a strong design portfolio can become one of the most powerful tools in your early career.
Building Confidence Through Design: How BYU Capstone Projects Shape Future Engineers
BYU capstone students tackle complex challenges head-on, transforming theory into hands-on innovation, like building a compact noise-testing station for Varex Imaging. Author Amber Glorius interviews capstone coach Robert Cloward to explore how these projects build both skills and confidence.
How to Become a Professor in Engineering Design
One career that is open to designers and engineers lies in academia. Becoming a professor is no easy task, but Chris Mabey (a past BDR editor) has successfully taken this route. Read on to learn his path and some insights to how you can emulate this journey.
Designing a College Semester: More Than Planning
School is back in session but many students will miss out on opportunities to maximize their learning, growth, and improvement. Dylan Conover shares some thoughts on how students can better design their semester and increase their performance in many areas with the right mindset and actions with more than planning.
What I Wish I Knew About Learning as an Undergrad
We all learn a lot while obtaining our university degrees. But learning how to learn is just as important. Find out what Marin wished she had known earlier during her undergrad about learning.
Becoming a Slow Student
Even though the world is moving fast and perhaps even accelerating, it doesn’t mean we can’t be slow in certain ways. Becoming a slow student may be exactly what we need to do to stay at our peak performance in this fast paced world we live in.
Back to School with the BYU Design Review
As the BDR editorial board, we asked each other which articles we could re-read to get ready for another school year. Here’s a list of 7 articles that could give you a kickstart on your next school year. Good luck!
How to get the most out of an engineering conference
Attending conferences can be nerve racking and exhausting, but they are also exciting and inspiring. When I started my PhD, I thought I would be able to go to many conferences, but a pandemic had other plans. I found myself only attending one in-person conference during my program. With only one chance at an in person conference, I knew I needed to make the most of it.
Three Unexpected Tips for Writing Better Technical Papers
After you have done good technical work such as discovering something new, or developing a new technology, your goal in a technical paper is to share those findings with other people. This is not as easy as it sounds. In this article, I share three tips for refining your technical writing that you won’t find anywhere else, but that I am sure will make your writing more readable and trustworthy.
Becoming Effective and Efficient in Your Work
Fluency means to do something with ease and accuracy. I would love to do mechanical engineering with ease and accuracy! This is something I aspire to, and for good reason. It means I can do more with my time. This article describes 5 things we all need to do to become more effective and efficient in our technical work.
Connecting the Dots Backwards: Not Knowing What We Don’t Know, Part 2
Billions of people use mathematics everyday, arithmetic to multivariable calculus. This has become a paradox that I have spent time thinking about – math is certainly useful, yet why is it so hard to explain or show students how it can be useful to them?
Connecting the Dots Backwards: Not Knowing What We Don’t Know, Part 1
Because we have so much information at our fingertips via smart devices and the internet many students complain at having to learn (especially memorize) anything. The common response by students is that this is a waste of time and that these things can always be looked up in the future. Well they certainly can. That isn’t the point I am debating. The problem is that you can only look up things that you know you don’t know.
Why NOT go to Graduate School?
In my previous article, I listed and described a number of reasons why everyone should seriously consider graduate school. In this article I’ll share some ideas why one might want to forgo graduate school entirely.
Why Go to Graduate School?
During my graduate program, I finally fell in love with school. That's right. It took more than four years after high-school, but it happened to me.
What is a Fellowship?
Simply put, a fellowship is a distinguished honor accompanied by a monetary award “that graduate students or postgraduate scholars typically compete for, and fellows are selected based on their potential to make a positive, long-lasting contribution to their academic discipline”
5 Tips for Learning Difficult Material
Learning is an essential skill as an engineer. New technology is always emerging and the skills needed for a particular design are always changing. Learning new skills isn’t always easy, especially when you progress past what Youtube can teach you.
Capstone Success Tips
Seniors in engineering around the country are about to start their capstone experience. For many of them it will be the biggest project they have ever undertaken. As a previous capstone student and coach here are some tips to help you be successful.
Design in Data Figures: Rasterized Versus Vectorized
Have you ever zoomed in on an image and it was so pixelated you couldn’t read or understand anything? Have you ever had an email get stuck behind a filter because your figures or images were too big in terms of file size? If any of that sounds familiar, you might be using the wrong kind of images or figures.
Five Articles to Get You Ready For School
The new school year is right around the corner. Succeeding in engineering coursework is no easy feat. Here’s some articles to make it a little easier for you.