JESS McCALL

None for it’s brutal winters AND summers, Iowa State was the school my Dad went to and the one I had always dreamed of going to. Come the summer of 07, I finally started my ISU career as a Materials Engineer and after spending 2.5 years and countless hours in the polymers and metals lab, I made the decision to move on to a degree program that wouldn’t see me stuck in a lab all day, Industrial Engineering. Having a materials background has actually really helped me understand the manufacturability of certain polymers and metals as well as the wear rates that can occur in production environment machinery. Iowa State University is probably one of the only places that could allow me to explore both Materials and Industrial Engineering and let me choose which portions of each of these disciplines fit for me and for that reason, I loved my college experience.

Good ol’ high school. Shenandoah is a really small town (really really small if you think a town with a population of 5,000 is a village) in southwest Iowa. While in high school, I was pretty focused on two things: running and computers. My computer obsession stemmed from, like most high school boys, my love of video games and in particular counter-strike, which I had been playing faithfully since the summer of 2000. While playing counter-strike on my parents 1998 Compaq, I wanted to understand why my frame rate would drop and what I could do, with limited funds because I was in 7th grade, do to increase the performance of my game. This led me down the path of computer customization and overclocking which would soon become my passion, besides going for a run to clear my head after hours of tinkering. The overclocking obsession led me down a path of creating “exotic” cooling solutions using aquarium equipment and some food grade tubing and developing a deep understanding of thermodynamics within a closed system and what materials worked the best together to limit bacteria growth and avoid galvanic corrosion (this might give you a better understanding on why/how I decided on materials engineering before even stepping foot into a college).