How Autostill Connected My Engineering Studies by Matthew

How Autostill Connected My Engineering Studies by Matthew - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

One project that made electrical engineering feel more real to me was Autostill, a small-scale automated distillation system I worked on in 2024. The question behind it was how to use pressure measurements to control heating and shut it off when needed. It gave me a chance to connect programming and circuit design to a physical process.

The system used an Arduino, pressure sensors, and relay modules. My work included programming the control logic, modeling the system in MATLAB, and creating 3D layouts. What interested me was how each part depended on the others. A pressure sensor could provide a measurement, but that measurement only became useful once the program interpreted it and the circuit responded.

Working on the automatic heat shutoff made me think more carefully about what it means for a system to work correctly. Turning something on and off is a straightforward goal. Deciding when it should turn off requires understanding what is happening in the system and what the measurement means. That connection between a sensor reading and a physical response was something I wanted to understand better.

MATLAB gave me another way to look at the project. I could model the system’s behavior and connect it to the control logic I was writing. Creating the physical layouts also required me to think about how the components would fit together. Moving between those different views helped me see why an engineering project needs more than a working piece of code or a circuit considered on its own.

The project also helped me understand why safety needs to be part of the design from the beginning. When a controller affects a heating process, its decisions have physical consequences. That made the details feel important in a way that was different from completing an isolated homework problem.

I am now studying Electrical Engineering at Cal Poly Pomona, and I want to continue building a career in power and electrical design. My utility and MEP design experience has given me more opportunities to work on systems that other people will rely on. Autostill helped build my interest in that kind of responsibility.

What stayed with me was the process of following a measurement through the whole system: where it came from, how the program used it, and what happened afterward. It made me more curious about controls and gave me a clearer understanding of how the subjects I study connect. I want to keep doing work where I can understand those connections and eventually see the result being used.