User:Spitre88

About Me
I am a freshman student at Duke University in the Pratt School of Engineering. I am currently interested in majoring in the Biomedical Engineering program with the hopes of attending a medical school in the future and furthering my education. After seeing a documentary about tissue engineering on the television alongside my father, I had always been interested in exploring the exciting world of biomedical engineering.

Name Pronunciation
By birth, my name is Simone Anne Pitre, but I simply go by Simone Pitre. Simone rhymes with "Timon", the meerkat from The Lion King, and Pitre rhymes with petri dish. Quite the exciting name, I know. Pitre is also the name of the pterydactyl from The Land Before Time, one of the movies that seemed to shape my childhood.

Interests
Point blank, rowing is my life. I am a coxswain for the women's NCAA crew team at Duke and I am absolutely in love with the sport. Everyone asks, "what is the coxswain's job? Do they sit and yell?" I am here to tell you, yes, that is exactly what we do--with a little bit of steering, motivating, technical calls and strategy too. I am entering my fifth year in the sport, and my thirteenth season consecutively. As for rowing honours, I have won the Royal Canadian Henley Regatta four times and placed fourth at the Head of the Charles Regatta twice thus far. One of the highlights of my career would be representing Canada on the CanAmMex 2011 team as the men's coxswain, and winning in the varsity 8+ and varsity 4+ against our American competitors.

The Homeland
Hailing from Canada, home of Tim Hortons and die-hard hockey fans, I can genuinely say that "eh" is frequently used in my vocabulary and yes, I do say the word "about" like all Canadians do--I say "a-boot". Coming to Duke, I left behind my wonderful family of six: my parents, older sister, younger sister, and beloved wheaten-coloured Cairn Terrier named Chester.

Hobbies
When I am not in class at Duke, you will most likely find me doing one of the following:
 * yelling in a boat on the water
 * sitting in the Krzyzewski Center (student-athlete center) doing homework
 * going out to dinner with the hallmates of my residence, including my fabulous roommate, Jenna
 * Skyping my friends and family back home
 * watching the movie Mean Girls over and over again

Grand Challenges for Engineering
One of the best parts about being in Pratt is that you are always involved in the ever-changing engineering world. After exploring the Grand Challenges for Engineering page, I found that the Solving the Problem of Clean Water for Poor Communities article was eye-catching to say the least. I have always been interested in helping the developing world and after a documentary in my senior year philosophy class about the human right to clean water, it is no wonder that this article struck me as exciting. I love that this low-budget and realistic solution is gradually taking flight in the engineering world and getting some of the credit that it deserves. I cannot wait to see this initiative move from Cal students to Duke students as well.

Article: Solving the Problem of Clean Water for Poor Communities, San Francisco Chronicle, Rick DelVecchio, May 13, 2006, accessed January 21, 2009 (Grand Challenge)

Demonstrations
On MATLAB, I surprisingly enjoyed more than one of the demonstrations. One of the first ones that I looked into was the Viewing a Penny demo which showed a penny's topography. It shed light on the perspective of a penny and made me second guess what was in my wallet a little bit. I would say that my top two favourite demos were the Bending Truss and the 3-D Drawing ones. I enjoyed the Bending Truss demonstration a lot because the basic graphics and bright colours reminded me of a computer game that I played in elementary school, called Maths Circus. Secondly, I loved the 3-D Drawing demo because the makevase segment, that allowed me to draw a vase, brought me back to the days where my colouring books had me mirror half of a drawing and my sisters watched me struggle through it. If only I knew what MATLAB was back in the day...

Signature
This is about as exciting as my signature will get, but here she is: Spitre88 (talk) 03:36, 10 September 2012 (UTC)