Dan Orbidan — Community Impact Award
CBEN
Post-graduation plans: Engineer at Serán BioScience in Bend, Oregon as a member of the formulations team
This award recognizes undergraduate students who contribute to improving their department/program, college, university and/or community.
What is your favorite memory from your time at CU Boulder?
My favorite memory from my time at CU Boulder is definitely when we were allowed to remove our masks during in-person learning for the first time following COVID. I had grown close with so many of my classmates during the pandemic, but seeing everyone's smiles for the first time in a couple of years was definitely a refreshing experience.
What accomplishment are you most proud of, either academically or personally?
I feel extremely proud of the work I did as an Emergency Medical Technician during my undergraduate career. I started my work right as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. There are so many fond memories, from my first time driving with lights and sirens running on the ambulance in the city of Boulder, to picking up patients off of landing planes and helicopters, to hiking into the middle of the woods to provide medical aid. I definitely got to get out and explore my state and help my community. I felt so much personal growth as a person, separate from my studies at CU Boulder.
Tell us about a moment (or moments) when you felt like you hit your stride or felt like you were “officially” an engineer.
The moment I first felt like I hit my stride as an engineer was when I began connecting what I had learned in my classes to the real world. During second semester junior year we learned about the inhibition of enzymes in biokinetics, and we had a clever homework problem about solving methanol poisoning in a professor's beloved dog by giving them ethanol in the form of the dog's favorite beer. I learned that ethanol competes with methanol for the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme in the body, and that if we provide enough ethanol over time, the ethanol will competitively bind to the enzyme and block methanol, giving the kidneys ample time to filter out the methanol before it gets converted into formic acid and then formaldehyde. I pitched the idea of using shots of hard liquor to treat a patient with methanol poisoning to my partners at work, and we actually realized that it may not be the worst option, should we ever run into it!
What was the biggest challenge for you during your engineering education? What did you learn from it?
My biggest challenge during my engineering education was all the troubles that came from COVID. Online learning was difficult for me, as at times it caused my motivation for school to severely diminish. However, I quickly learned that creating small group chats with peers brought a bit more of that "out of class" social element back and helped me restore my motivation to continue pushing through. It's the same idea as when you are walking to and from class and chatting with friends about life events and lecture topics simultaneously; having that sense of community helps you fit in and keep your motivation up.
What is your advice for incoming engineering students?
My biggest piece of advice for incoming engineering students is to not take yourself so seriously and learn how to break the perfectionistic mentality. The course work can be grueling and all encompassing, and at a competitive engineering school, you can easily fall into the habit of deriving self value from your academic performance, but it's important to keep this in check. You will fail exams, miss homeworks, totally fumble your way through a pop quiz, etc. This is okay, because you won't be the only one, and the sooner you can learn to laugh it off and move along, the happier you will be and the better you will do in your career as an undergraduate and beyond.