ME Undergraduate Spotlight: Gissell Jimenez

Meet Gissell Jimenez, a third-year undergraduate student here in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley. Gissell was kind enough to talk with me via Zoom, carving out time between online classes, studying, projects, work, virtually connecting with friends – an amazing juggling act that I’m sure all members of our ME community are trying to maintain during these unprecedented times. I was inspired by Gissell’s positivity and her passion for helping other mechanical engineering students via the ME Scholars program and her job as a tutor.

Gissell grew up in Los Angeles, living there until her move to Berkeley. She said that moving to the Bay Area was a big change and risky choice she made because she accepted her offer before ever visiting the campus. Gissell grew up in an area where “not a lot of people are motivated to go to college, or to seek out higher education,” but she knew that she liked learning and the feeling you get from learning, and knew that this was something she wanted to pursue. Gissell began to research the history of UC Berkeley, becoming more inspired and excited about starting her new journey in Northern California – a place she now loves and considers her second home.

Gissell started at UC Berkeley as a Bioengineering major, and transitioned into being a Mechanical Engineering major, with her interests still leaning towards biomechanics and working with prosthetics. Before shelter-in-place orders began, Gissell got a chance to work with graduate students in the O’Connell Lab on a microfluidic chip, creating an environment where the chip would be able to mimic the tissue in the vertebral discs of the spine. Gissell hopes that working on projects like these can help make a positive impact in people’s lives, helping to prevent problems or ailments from becoming worse.

As I mentioned earlier, another passion of Gissell’s is working on the ME Scholars program – a peer-mentoring network within ME. “Working with Ricky (Ricky Vides, ME Student Services & Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Advisor), I realized that there are students that come from places like me, that look like me, and that are motivated to be a better version of themselves and seek higher education, but the preparation they come in with isn’t really the best,” says Gissell. “I think that one thing online learning is doing is creating a bigger disparity between those students that have access to resources and those that do not.”

Gissell hopes to work with these students, take them under her wing, and help expose them to a different world. It wasn’t until Gissell started working with mentors herself, that she realized her full potential and goal of obtaining a PhD. Gissell acknowledges that she’s had her fair share of tumbles along the way, but that she’s finally at a place where she hopes she can share the knowledge of how she got to where she is now and what she’s learned with others. She’d like to create an environment where students can get on the same level of other students more quickly, and not have to lose their confidence on the way.

“I hope that by the time I leave Berkeley, I create an environment where today’s freshman can teach this information to next year’s freshman class and so on, such that it becomes a cycle. And that eventually when we leave Berkeley, we start outreaching and going into the communities we came from to be the role models that we needed growing up. I hope to come back and be that professor that can talk to them and show them that it is possible for someone who came from where they came from.”

Gissell also works at the Student Learning Center where she tutors other students; something she’s learned she has an affinity for. “More than just showing the students that I know the topics, or helping them through homework, it’s just nice to have them see what I see, and see what other professors have taught me, and show them other ways to do things,” says Giselle. “I just really enjoy it!” She hopes to also grow this “academic preparation” type of tutoring within the ME Scholars program, setting a foundation that carries through to the upper-divison courses.

Gissell’s advice for new students:

“The biggest thing I’ve learned is to ask for help and work with others. I came in thinking I could do it all by myself and giving off this impression that I do know what I’m doing for everything, even when I didn’t. I think it’s important to learn to work together because, even if you can do it alone, what is it for if you’re not interacting with others and having fun and sharing your knowledge? There’s nothing to lose when you’re working together as a team; where you can share your ideas, and share where your weaknesses lie as well as where your strengths lie within each other. I’d say, as soon as you get to Berkeley, start looking for people to work together with, and start building your cohort that you’ll go through these years at Berkeley with. I swear that it will be better and I swear that it will be fun along the way!”