Ian Steenstra
White Key 2018
Degree(s)
B.S. in Computer & Systems Engineering, 2020
About Me
As a student at Rensselaer, my core areas of campus involvement include research through the ECSE department, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, Foundry Club, Fencing Club, Engineering Ambassadors, business competitions, and Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS).
My research began the first semester of freshman year where I worked under Alhussein Abouzeid in the field of wireless networking for smart environments. Through this research, my partner and I created and ran a program for students at Watervliet High School to learn networking, coding and circuitry skills with Raspberry Pis. The involvement in this research/program lead me to become a member of RPI Engineering Ambassadors (EA) and a Teacher Assistant for Internetworking of Things.
Within EA, I give multiple presentations each semester to young students in the effort to inspire them to become engineers. I then merged my affiliations in the ECSE department (CURENT) and EA, in order to create a 9-hour program to offer students the ability to build a Solar Radiation Monitor and learn the academics that derive from the device’s construction and concepts involving the power grid. In addition, I lead a team of REUs to create a new version of the Solar Radiation Monitor that is being utilized as a tool for collecting weather data within research and capstone groups at RPI.
Lastly, I worked on multiple projects at RPI. These included camouflaged solar shingles for the RPI Change the World Challenge, and Constellation for the Deloitte business competition and RCOS. Constellation is a website for RPI students to connect with professors and search for research projects that are the best match for their skills and study.