When he moved to Canada from Taiwan in 2004, Kuan-Chih Chen chose a new name. Just call him ‘Rocky.’
“It’s a name that made me feel stronger. I was alone and had to do everything for myself and I needed to be stronger,” he said.
Today, Rocky’s circumstances are quite different. He’s working on a PhD in mechanical engineering, researching the way dust devils transport water vapour on Mars. At the U of A Faculty of Engineering, he’s in a rigorous program that challenges him academically—and he has become part of a vibrant community.
Rocky spends his free time playing slo-pitch in the summer and snowboarding during the winter. He’s active in Edmonton’s Taiwanese community, serving as vice president of the Taiwanese Universities Alumni Association – Alberta Chapter.
Rocky will tell anyone that it takes time to settle in. Kristen Thomas, who began working on her master’s degree in September, 2011, is slowing getting into the swing of things as a graduate student in engineering. During her first week, Thomas says she felt a little out of place.
“The first week was a little overwhelming just because of the size of the place and the number of students here,” she said. “Even in the master’s programs the number of students was shocking.”
After earning her undergraduate degree in civil engineering at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Thomas moved to the U of A Faculty of Engineering in Edmonton to work on a master’s degree in structural engineering.
At UNB, the smallest classes Thomas took as an undergraduate were positively intimate.
“I had some structural classes at UNB that had five students in them. In my master’s classes there are 20 to 25 students, or more. I’m fairly certain that the campus population here is more than the population of Fredericton.”
She’s not too far off. The population of her home town is just over 56,000. The U of A has a student population of approximately 38,000. But that certainly doesn’t make it impersonal. Friendships form fast in an environment where it seems that everyone is from somewhere else.
“I have friends today who are helpful and very kind,” said Rocky. “They’re always willing to help me out with anything.”
One of those friends, Jakub Zubik, works at the desk next to Rocky. The two work on space-related research projects under the supervision of mechanical engineering professor Carlos Lange, whose own designs were part of NASA’s 2008 Mars Phoenix Lander mission.
Zubik moved to Edmonton in 2006 to live with relatives here, after graduating from engineering at Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland. When he considered the courses required to become a practicing engineer in Alberta, he decided to enroll in a PhD program at the Faculty of Engineering. He was impressed by the U of A’s research areas and its resources.
“I was looking for a professor who would be a good fit for me and who was doing research in an area I wanted to study,” he said. Lange was working on computational fluid dynamics—an area Zubik was interested in, but unable to study at Wroclaw because the school couldn’t afford the software licensing fees.
“Carlos at that time was doing work on computer cooling and I said ‘Yeah—why not?!”
That research project has since morphed into research on the water cycle on the surface of Mars, using computational fluid dynamics.
Rocky tells a similar story about finding his research niche: After earning his mechanical engineering degree at Da-Yeh University in Taiwan, he wanted to see what life was like beyond his country’s borders. He moved to Toronto to learn English and not long after, headed to the U.S. to work on a master’s degree at the University of Detroit – Mercy.
After completing his master’s degree he was still hungry for knowledge and began searching for a school to further advance his education. The U of A stood out among “the better universities in Canada” because of its resources: he was impressed by the university’s libraries and the breadth of research being conducted in the Faculty of Engineering.
“I was interested in space-related projects but the university I went to previously didn’t have anything like that,” he said.
A broad selection of opportunities in education and research is what drew Thomas to the Faculty of Engineering as well.
There are positives to the U of A’s size, she says: students here have more choices in areas to study and research. This, in fact, is why Thomas left New Brunswick: there was no steel structural engineering program at her home university.
Chances are she could have found a university closer to home offering the programs she was interested in but Thomas says she wanted quality.
Today, studies occupy most of her time. Under the supervision of structural engineering professor Bob Driver, she is conducting progressive collapse research, testing different kinds of steel structure joints to their failure point by applying tension and rotation forces to them.
In the free time she makes for herself, Thomas has been taking in concerts—seeing performers who probably wouldn’t be touring to New Brunswick; and she even went to the Canadian Finals Rodeo to get a taste of cowboy culture. On weekends, she likes to check out the Strathcona Farmer’s Market.
Thomas is enjoying the city but ultimately it was the U of A that brought her here.
“It wasn’t an issue that I was going to move, and the U of A’s program for structural engineering—especially steel design—is really good. That’s what I was looking for. I had to move anyway, so I decided to find the school with the best program and go there.”