Momentum - November 2020 - 20

CAREER PATH

DOSSIER: MADELINE CORRIGAN
OF NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
TYPICALLY, MOMENTUM'S DOSSIER SECTION
FEATURES A RECENT GRADUATE. But we are
making a special exception for an special young
woman this month. Madeline Corrigan is her
name, and winning MOMENTUM's 2020 article
contest is her game-among many other games,
such as engineering. Her article on the
Northwestern Formula SAE team, of which she
was part, appeared in the October 2020 issue.
About two dozen worthy articles were judged by
the SAE Membership staff team and the
MOMENTUM editor. For her efforts, Corrigan will
receive payment of $1,000 USD.
Read on to learn more about Corrigan and her
SAE journey.
How does it feel to have won the MOMENTUM
article contest?
I entered the contest not expecting to win
anything, I just wanted to highlight the efforts of
my teammates to come up with creative and
cheap solutions to traditionally expensive design
processes. It feels nice to have my voice heard,
and the money will help offset all the loans to pay
for school. I haven't actually taken any specific
writing classes in college, but I went to a
humanities-heavy high school where it wasn't
unusual to have multiple analytical essays due in

Madeline Corrigan enjoys one of the last warm sunny days in Evanston, Ill.
the same week, and I had some wonderfully strict teachers who held all of us
to high standards starting freshman year. I did have to take two quarters of
Design Thinking and Communication class my first year at Northwestern, and
my group won the communication award at the design expo at the end of
the project despite none of us having any desire to communicate with each
other in the slightest. It's important to remember that being successful in
engineering requires those sorts of "soft" skills, not just technical skills like
knowing how to mill an upright or calculate a center of pressure.
Why did you decide to become an engineer?
When I was younger, I was considering becoming an ecologist and studying
birds. One day when I was 16, I had the opportunity to shadow an
ornithologist at the Natural History Museum, but the same day I was visiting
her, a graduate student in mechanical engineering was enlisting her help
collecting skin and skeleton samples from anhingas. He was studying their
unique ability to stretch their necks at outstandingly high speeds to catch
fish without sustaining any damage to their own bodies, in order to apply the
same principles to the design of amphibious naval vehicles. I thought
biomimetic engineering sounded like a way cooler career than counting
birds for a living, so I updated my life plans accordingly. It fit together with
my interests in math, physics, and working with my hands.

Suited up for a day of cutting and sanding carbon fiber.

20 November 2020

To what character traits do you attribute your success to date?
What's gotten me to where I am now is how much I care: I care about the
work I do, the people I work with, and the consequences of my actions. I'm
pursuing a degree in a field I'm passionate about, and that's driven me to do
the work necessary to be successful in it. Being naturally energetic means
my mind is running in all different directions, but when I can focus that
energy on a task, I can do it for hours. Although my assertiveness often
bothered people on my CDS team, I've learned to see that part of me as a

MOMENTUM
Momentum - November 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Momentum - November 2020
