User:Edm24

Eli Medvescek is an engineering student and kalimba enthusiast at Duke University. Eli is new to this programming business and becomes giddy after accomplishing simple tasks such as creating a wiki or putting his name on a LaTeX document. When he grows up Eli wants to be stunningly bright engineer, or at least, a passable magician.

Past Life

When Eli was four or five years old, his parents enrolled him in an Oscar Mayer singing competition in hopes of winning a lifetime supply of hot dogs for the family. The project was unsuccessful, and Eli did not even get the chance to ride in the famed Wienermobile. To this day, this explains Eli's preference for Nathan's hot dogs.

As he grew into his awkward teen years, Eli started skateboarding and stopped cutting his hair. At one point he considered dying black streaks into his radiant red hair, but reevaluated this stance after his good friend (and reliable barista) told him he would look like a tiger. (On this note, if Eli ever becomes a disk jockey, his preferred name is DJ El Tigre.)

In high school Eli developed a fondness for diplomas and decided to get two, extending the duration of his high school education to almost six years. He studied three and a half years at Canyon del Oro High School in Tucson, Arizona and two years at Waterford KaMhlaba in Swaziland. Considering Malcolm Gladwell's theory that 10,000 hours of practice make an expert, this makes Eli very close to being an expert in "high school". He is still unsure as to the value of this expertise.

Current Predicaments

Eli currently lives in Alspaugh on Duke University's East Campus. He is very fond of the people and extremely un-fond of the appalling temperature. Eli's most memorable days at Duke include the first two weeks (when Cinnamon Toast Crunch was available in excess at the Marketplace), and that one day the frozen yogurt machine was working.

Eli is a rock climber and member of the Duke Outing Club, as well as a new member of the Engineering World Health chapter at Duke.

Future Plans

At this point, Eli is considering a BME / Global Health double major, taking advantage of this unique and compelling opportunity that Duke offers. He is also considering medical school, though has not made any concrete decisions regarding this yet.

Among other things, Eli would someday like to go to Antarctica, learn to juggle, and see Pulp Fiction all the way through.

Cantaloupe

This section links to a Wikipedia article about cantaloupe. Eli added this section mostly to see what an automatically generated table of contents looks like.

MATLAB Demonstrations

Of the many MATLAB demonstrations available for viewing in the program, one of the most compelling is the demo that shows various bending modes of a truss. I particularly like this program for two reasons. Firstly, it clearly demonstrates the capacity of MATLAB in real-world engineering application, such as the design and challenge of bridge models. This gives me further confidence that learning MATLAB (the main goal of EGR 103) will be extremely beneficial to my engineering pursuits in the future, offering me tremendous modeling potential. Secondly, the demo itself explores a huge variety of bending modes, far more than I could have considered if I were designing this model. After showing the first bending mode (the most obvious distortion), it goes on to demonstrate eleven other imaginative and insightful challenges to the model. I really admire the thoroughness of this demo, and once again, am compelled by the detailed analysis offered by MATLAB.

As a side note, I also really enjoy the 3D Drawing Demo, mostly because it's the closest I'll ever get to being good at pottery.

Grand Challenges in Engineering Article

Researchers Develop System That Uses a Big Data Approach to Personalized Healthcare, William G. Gilroy, University of Notre Dame, uploaded 25 July 2013, accessed 15 September 2013.