Pushing Onward

Valpo’s College of Engineering is a place where students can expect to be mentored, challenged, and tested in order to reach their highest potential. Our faculty believes that each incoming student, regardless of their background, carries a different perspective and offers something valuable to the field of engineering. For Isoken Ogli ’23, the encouragement that she received from her teachers and Dean Doug Tougaw ’05 MBA played a vital role in shaping who she would be as a student and in the formation of her post-graduation career goals.

“I’m an international student and people sometimes ask me ‘why did you choose Valpo, a small school in Indiana?’’ says Isoken. “I like to think that everything that happens in my life happens for a reason and falls into alignment for a reason and being at Valpo was a blessing. I don’t think I would have succeeded and been highlighted in the way that I was had it not been for Valpo because though I was pioneering a path that most people have not gone through, I had a lot of support from my professors and Dean Tougaw. I’m the first Nigerian Black woman to be in a lot of the spaces that I was in engineering at Valpo and that was hard but it was easier at Valpo.”

Isoken entered Valpo on the premed track and believed that her vocation lay in the health care field as a medical doctor. After a few classes, she found that her true passion was grounded in the design aspect of health care and she quickly readjusted her studies to biomedical engineering to pursue what she believed to be her true calling. Once she stepped foot in Gellersen, she recognized that it would be a rigorous path, but she trusted in her instincts and relied on her Valpo community to keep her moving forward.

“Becoming a Valpo engineer means believing in your own potential and trusting your instincts to lead you to new heights,” says Isoken. “The more I got to know my professors, the easier it was for me to feel at ease and in place at Gellersen because I knew I had a village that in some capacity believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself. My professors and Dean Tougaw saw the raw talent in me and when I felt like I was going to give up they pushed me to keep going.”

Our faculty’s dedication to their students is something inherent in Valpo, and the success that students are able to find as a result of that dedication is the Valpo difference. Isoken was able to find her path in the College of Engineering because she felt supported and valued throughout her journey and that support translated into her wanting to give back in the form of becoming a camp counselor for the College of Engineering summer camp.

“One of my goals is to diversify engineering. It’s not one size fits all and being an engineer is not out of reach,” says Isoken. “Being a camp counselor allowed me to really access my personal goals and guide students who were so different and so talented and help them see their potential. It was very successful for the students who participated and for the counselors because it gave us a newfound passion for the work we do. They came into the camp feeling unsure and hesitant, and they left feeling like ok engineering is not impossible. It’s rigorous and it will take time, but it’s not impossible.”

The summer camp program allows high school students to get a taste of life at Valpo’s engineering program before they apply and gives them the resources they need to start building their communities with confidence. Sharing her several semesters of research and focused engagement in biomedical engineering, Isoken showed students the value of research as a tool in their skillset.

“I spent the entire summer doing research under the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) Grant with Professor Reva Johnson, and that exposed me to what industry work could look like because we were working on website building, we were working on prosthetics manufacturing, and we worked with Bionic Prosthetics which is a company in Merrillville,” Isoken says. “Our research then allowed us to go to the Biomedical Engineering Society Conference, which is one of the largest biomedical engineering conferences. We presented our research and got to speak directly to people who were manufacturing all kinds of things like vaccines, all kinds of prosthetics, and printing 3D hearts. We were able to meet forefront runners in the industry in that conference.”

The research that Isoken became so familiar with and passionate about then became her main focus as a camp counselor as her team gave students a crash course in factors that influence prosthetic design such as stress, body movements, measurements, fittings, and general comfort of the patient they work with.

“We gave a lot of demonstrations. We wanted to show them how functioning tendons would look, so we did a mock design with cardboard, string, and straws then designed a hand,” Isoken says. “So, we gave them a general idea of what bioengineering looks like in terms of human interactions.”

The group also had access to Valpo’s motorized prosthetics housed in the bioengineering lab and were able to see how the hands work, study the feedback, and understand the research that goes behind their conception. Valpo’s College of Engineering offers undergraduates the opportunity to begin research as early as freshman year in a lab that is equipped with top tier technology. The summer camp allows hesitant students to find the spark they needed to make the commitment and follow their passions.

“I think these programs are integral to student success,” Isoken says. “You can see the hesitation in some of these new students, but you can also see the raw passion and a lot of talent. Sometimes in STEM we pass judgment when we see people, like ‘oh that person doesn’t look like an engineer’ but at this camp, we had all kinds of people who look all kinds of ways with different personalities working together towards one goal.”

One of the main goals that Isoken hoped to achieve through her role as a camp counselor was to help students reach their potential and believe in their abilities to accomplish extraordinary tasks. And she left Valpo feeling like she was able to achieve more than she set out to achieve because of the support and guidance she received from her community and mentors.

“The people you meet along the way are what makes the experience really meaningful,” says Isoken. “It’s not just about the design, it’s not just about drawing and models, anybody can do that — A.I. can do that. What brings the passion back into the field is the people you are around, and I think that’s very important and that’s why I’m so passionate.”