Pictured above: Recent Zoom conversation with Seth Dixon'18 and Head of School, Sara Primo
Who are you now and what are you doing that really grabs your attention?
I’m a young person in college trying to figure out what I’m doing with my degree. Right now I’m working at the Advanced Structures and Composites Center here at the University of Maine Orono. Work has been very exciting, learning stuff I don’t really get to learn in the classroom.
I’m learning about leadership too. I’m the president of the Society of Automotive Engineers Club here on campus. It’s a slightly large team of twenty people, so learning how to manage people and manage time has been something I’ve been really working on this year.
My team had the Composites Center works with large thermoplastic structures. We have the largest plastic 3-D printer in the world here at UMaine. Our team is working with the prints it creates and trying to understand them better. We’re doing a lot with how to model how it performs: when it will break, how it will move. It transforms ‘it might work’ into real numbers that can be calculated.
In high school, I was the team captain for our Robotics Team so I had a little bit of experience managing a team, but there were a lot of adults in the room helping. Here, there’s no adults involved now. There’s a lot of learning the background stuff, like the paperwork – it’s learning how to manage all the logistics.
What is a highlight of something that you have done since graduating?
The past two summers, I’ve been able to work at an internship with a small startup in Portland doing autonomous sailboats. They are developing an autonomous sailboat designed for estuary and ocean research; it’s only 2 meters. That was really cool to see a company working and being able to help with a project that could have a real impact. One of the projects they’d like to use it for is water quality in the Chesapeake Bay to help introduce oysters since all the oysters have been farmed out and the water has subsequently gotten really gross. That was cool and very direct: look at this, I’m doing something to help. During that internship, I did some design work for the control system, I helped design the human interface. And I helped with testing.
Do you have a favorite memory of FSP?
I remember FSP fondly. For me, the island years were memorable: it’s a pretty cool experience to go to school on an island. And the freedom that we had during the years when the school was trying to figure out who it was, for a small child was pretty cool.
