Brown University

Lucian Sharpe, Class of 2024, is a mechanical engineering concentrator from Concord, Massachusetts. He has been a part of Brown’s club sailing team since his first year and formerly served as club captain. After graduation, he will be working as an engineer building electric boats for the Rhode Island-based startup Flux Marine. — I’ve always tinkered with things since I was a kid. But the whole reason I wanted to do engineering, aside from being a bit of a science nerd, was that it teaches you how to learn really quickly. And that’s one of the biggest things Brown tries to teach us. I’ve been told that if you do engineering, it’s your entire life. I was really excited to see that when I showed up to Brown, I could do engineering and sailing. Sailing is really good at teaching time management and communication skills. That cross-disciplinary education makes me a better candidate when I go to apply for engineering jobs. The engineering curriculum lets me take classes in other disciplines but apply what I’ve learned in engineering. Last spring, I found this archaeology class based on Roman and Greek engineering. And for the final project, my roommates and I built a five-foot catapult that can fly 100 feet. So I got to use everything I’ve learned in engineering and apply it to this archaeology class. Sailing is a really unique sport on campus because the club team gets to practice with the varsity team, so they’re very much integrated. I’ve been very fortunate to get this experience. I probably wouldn’t have been able to walk on to the varsity team [my first year], but I still get to sail alongside these guys, and I’m great friends with them. In sailing, we have these start horns that tell us when the race starts, and they tend to break sometimes. The coach knows I’m an engineer and says, ‘Hey, can you fix this?’ and I can go into the Brown Design Workshop, tinker with it, get it working and bring it back. It’s a really cool way of taking engineering outside of the classroom. — #BrownMyWay is a social media series that showcases the intellectual and extracurricular curiosity of Brown University students, faculty and staff.