Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate

My Story

Hi!

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My name is Allison Goehringer, and sports are a huge part of my life. Growing up in the Boston suburbs, I became a die hard Red Sox, Celtics, and Patriots fan. I went to tons of sports games with my dad and eventually began to play sports on my own: kicking a soccer ball in the backyard, making baskets in the driveway, and  getting a little too competitive during playground games at recess. My love for sports grew as I began to play organized sports joining the local basketball and softball teams. While these team sports allowed me to grow my own skills and athleticism they also taught me how to collaborate with a team. Though we were just trying to win a match within every game, we had to work together to come up with a strategy to beat our opponents. Sometimes it was about improving the mechanics of a swing, or sometimes it was just about having better communication on the court. Either way it took some problem-solving to figure out a solution.

My love for both sports and collaboration led me to the perfect place to pursue my undergraduate education: Duke University. Aside from having a great basketball team; Duke Engineering is unique in the fact that it emphasized collaboration, interdisciplinary experiences, and project based learning. During my freshman year, I was exposed to one of these interdisciplinary experiences, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) certificate and thought it would be a perfect fit. Having truly enjoyed EGR 101, an intro engineering course where student teams are paired with a client and expected to iterate through the engineering design process to deliver a final product that solves the client's needs, I saw the I & E certificate as a way to continue this process throughout my undergraduate experience and encourage me to work with nonengineers in the overall process. 

As a Mechanical Engineering major with a minor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, I am focused on developing products with a holistic view of the entire system. Being able to understand how the different parts of the product interact with each other ensures that the product is a complete solution and works as the client desires. My degree path along with the I & E certificate allows me to develop solutions that solve more complex and interdisciplinary problems.

My desire to work with teams has grown beyond the field and into academic settings. Starting in my freshman year I have been actively working on autonomously measuring the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest. The team is looking to accomplish this using a fleet of non-invasive drones to promote conservation policy development, aid in ecological enforcement, and better understand the rainforest environment for potential breakthroughs in science. While the initial challenge is incredibly complex, we broke the problem down and my responsibility was to redesign smaller drones to fly in rainforest conditions and take quality pictures to be used for animal and plant identification. Beyond that, I have had the opportunity to work on a wide range of different teams and organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to start ups. Despite the different team environments, every team that I have worked on has had one thing in common: working together to solve complex interdisciplinary global problems. 

All of these unique, interdisciplinary, and complex challenges have empowered me to continue solving these problems and leave a positive impact on the world.