The Product Realization Lab is where Stanford students learn to design and engineer physical products. It is a place for hands-on engineering: iterating through prototypes, testing and selecting materials, and choosing the process that fits the part. I arrived as a student and Course Assistant, and after graduating became part of the staff running the lab.
What I did:
- Coached 50+ students end-to-end from concept to working prototype in ME 203, Design and Manufacturing, guiding decisions on form, materials, mechanisms, and process as ideas took physical shape.
- Mentored 1,000+ students on the shop floor across CNC machining, welding, milling, turning, casting, woodworking, 3D printing, and laser cutting, translating open-ended concepts into a fabrication plan suited to each part's geometry, material, and budget.
- Ran CAD/CAM and DFM reviews for 20+ students per quarter, catching tool crashes, missing draft angles, unmanufacturable wall thicknesses, and tolerances outside a machine's capability before they became scrapped stock and lost weeks.
- Supported researchers across the Prakash Lab, Skylar-Scott Lab, CHARM Lab, and the Solar Car Project in designing and fabricating custom experimental hardware and test rigs, usually on timelines where a failed part meant a delayed experiment.
- Built the lab's waterjet and ShopBot CNC router programs from the ground up, authoring the curriculum, safety training, and setup documentation, and training two generations of waterjet specialists to run them after me. Waterjet throughput now runs close to 350 cut parts a year.
My specialty areas were water jet cutting, sheet metal forming, and welding
