LEaPP Portfolio
I attended the University of Iowa to obtain my bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. Along with my major, I received a certificate in Naval Science & Technology and became a graduate of the Leadership, Ethics, and Professional Pathways program. I am continuing studies at the University of Iowa for a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a thesis focused on interactions between fluid flows and solid structures.
LEaPP Program Experience
My work in the LEaPP program has taught me an incredible amount about not only leadership, ethics, and professional development, but a lot about myself as well. I have been able to define my strengths and weaknesses as a leader and learn how to apply them in my career. The LEaPP program has also granted me access to events and seminars in the college of engineering and the entire university that I would have never experienced without it. I was invited to attend the University of Iowa College of Engineering Distinguished Alumni Awards in 2023 and 2024, and have multiple meetings with the university president, Barbara Wilson. Meeting so many people with significant career and leadership experience has been the most valuable part of the LEaPP academy for me, and it would never have been possible without the program.
After my first semester of the program, I decided to apply to become a LEaPP mentor. I was hired to mentor students working through the program, on anything they had questions about, but mostly focused on their involvement and leadership experiences. Being a mentor, I learned even more about leadership by hearing the experiences of my peers. I was able to talk to them and give advice where it was needed, but also learn from their own experiences and apply them to my own life and career.
Leadership Writing Sample
I was motivated to take on the role of president of the University of Iowa Men’s Water Polo Club Team to grow my own leadership skills and grow the team. I have loved the sport of water polo since I first started in middle school but did not want to continue to play highly competitively in college. I decided to join the club team at Iowa because it seemed like a nice balance of competitiveness and fun. I set myself and the team a goal of finding this balance when I became president and maintaining it when I graduate.
My own leadership has grown significantly since taking on the role, I have been coordinating team logistics, spending, funding, coaching, and recruiting since taking it on. It has taught me a lot about managerial leadership as well as how to get people with different ideas of what the team should look like to work toward a common goal despite their ideas. I had to learn to read what others were feeling on certain days and adapt our practice plan for that day to fit. I wanted to keep everyone exited and engaged with the team but also push them to get better.
The most resonating experience with the team has been realizing my own skill as a leader. This has been my first real chance to take charge of a group of people and accomplish something. I have been impressed by the team since day one, but also by myself throughout the time I have been president. I realized on the first day of our season in fall of 2023 fall how far we had come since I became in charge of the team in 2021. We have managed to get the first 6 game win streak in program history, get the best results in school history at the CWPA Big 10 tournament two years in a row, and host our first ever tournament at home. We have also made financial gains and increased the number of players on our team by 35%. Realizing this made me proud to continue as a leader and exited to take on more leadership roles. I have learned a lot about myself and my leadership strategies in this role that I am excited to apply to other parts of my life and career.
Ethics Writing Sample
My interpretation of ethics for an individual is different from the ethics of a company or from an engineering perspective. Ethics from an engineering perspective have much more weight on the impact on the public and people who may interact with the engineers work than a personal ethical perspective. The most important ethical value for engineers to uphold is their outlook on safety, health, and welfare of the public. Engineers need to prioritize these differently depending on the situation and finding that difference can be difficult. For example, a mass-produced car suspension needs to have an extremely low failure rate to be considered safe, while the radio in that same vehicle can have a much higher failure rate while not creating any danger for the user. This decision is made by the engineers budgeting time and money during the design process, and they must weigh the benefits and drawbacks to applying money and effort into each project and how they impact the public. Another important ethical value for engineers is honesty and responsibility. Engineers should be aware of their own capabilities and honest with themselves and others about them. Someone who is not qualified for a project has to make that clear before accepting the responsibility of completing it. If they overestimate their own abilities or lie about them, they can cause a dangerous situation and fail to meet the expectations they placed on themselves. It is good to challenge yourself in engineering but knowing the line between a project destined to fail and a challenging one is crucial. The last important value would be for engineers to be faithful to their employer, coworkers, and clients. There is an important system of patents, trademarks, and standards to hold engineers and others faithful to their own work and not allow them to replicate others’ work without honoring the work done by others. Violations of this system are strongly penalized and cause financial and reputational damage to companies, coworkers, and the clients involved. One engineer on a team who does not follow this system can cause massive problems down the line. Being faithful and honest in the work completed is critical for engineers’ ethical success.
The most important thing I have learned along the ethics pathway was in my conversations with the university president, Barbara Wilson. I was fortunate enough to have a sit-down lunch with her and other students, and to represent the students in the college of engineering during a visit by her office. She has difficult ethical dilemmas to consider everyday regarding the success of the university, its students and staff, and the entirety of Iowa City. She has to weigh the impact of countless decisions made for the university and it showed me the perspective of a high-level decision maker when considering ethical dilemmas. One example discussed in detail with her at the lunch event was how funding is spread between colleges within the university. Should the funding go to the college or department that makes the most money, or has the most people, or has an impact on the students directly? This was an interesting perspective to witness because of the number of factors in her decisions, there is no one person who would be happy with her opinions, but she has to compromise with thousands of people to make as many of them satisfied as possible while keeping the goals of the university as a whole in consideration. These decisions are made by her and her team on a range of scopes, from massive research grants to small visual decisions on buildings, to cutting or adding division 1 sports programs. Hearing their method to determine the weight of each factor in a decision made the process of working through a detailed ethical dilemma much clearer to me.
Professional Pathways Writing Sample
Over the summer I was in the Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division. I was placed in Code 8441 which is the weights and stability code for both submarines and surface ships. I gained significant experience in the field that I want to pursue, and I was even offered a job if I would like to return after graduating. I was granted a Secret level security clearance which also opens significant career opportunities for me in the future. I was able to work on multiple classes of ships and with multiple types of software and data from previously conducted tests and experiments. One project I worked on was creating a software tool to adapt an outdated and non-user-friendly software to be used quickly and accurately by sailors on deployment. This software is called Ship Hull Characteristics Program (USN SHCP C844 Stability Software), it allows both scientists to use Naval Architecture models to determine the stability and performance of a ship or submarine. The software I worked on will allow scientists or sailors to use the software without needing significant knowledge of the inner workings of the software and the Naval Architecture principals behind it. It can take an input from the user to determine if the vessel in question is currently in a safe state and what mission parameters are within its capabilities at its current state.
I also gained experience using the code’s Flooding Casualty Control Software (USN NavSea FCCS) to better understand how the tool we were developing would be utilized by sailors on deployment. Much of this software is not public knowledge however it is able to help in incident response by determining the changes that must be made to get a ship into a warfighting ready state. I was able to sit in on an incident response drill in our office, which involved communicating possible incidents with sailors on deployment, and the staff in our office analyzing the responses output by FCCS.
I was also able to go on a day trip to the Navy shipyard in Norfolk Virginia. On this trip I was able to meet much of the crew of multiple vessels and get a tour of them. I was able to tour the Nimitz class aircraft carrier CVN 77 USS George H. W. Bush, the Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser CG 64 USS Gettysburg, and the Virginia class nuclear fast attack submarine SSN 779 USS New Mexico. Overall, this trip was my favorite part of my internship because I was able to meet some of the people who would benefit from the work that I was doing. It made the entire experience more rewarding and solidified my interest in Naval Science.
DiPatri 