My name is Justin Chang Stauffer. I will be graduating Northwestern in 2025, majoring in mechanical engineering with a concentration in design. I love solving puzzles, working with my hands, and modeling.
I think something that sets me apart from a lot of other engineers is my empathy-- its why I decided to go towards design in the first place. As much as I enjoy the "harder" math and physics side of engineering (and trust me, I've done my share), I realized it cut me off from interacting with people and seeing the impacts of my work. As someone who has always seen and felt things from other people's viewpoints, I want to use my abilities to actually make a difference in people's lives.
I'm hoping to work in the intersection between user interaction and design mechanics. I want to ideate and conceptualize designs that directly improve the lives of the people and the world around me.
My DESIGN
Process
I think a good example of how my brain
works comes from my first upper level
design class last year. On the first day,
our professor gave us a short introductory activity:
take 3 minutes to design a door knob.
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My first thought was "why do we need to design a new doorknob? What's
wrong with current designs?" But the more I thought, certain moments came
to my mind: the frequent times my hands were full and I was forced to awkwardly shuffle to push the handle with my elbow, or trying to open a bathroom door with wet hands. I also remembered hearing about how hard it was to push open a door while in a wheelchair, and thought back to the installations of foot handles over COVID.
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I started thinking about how I could best improve these issues. I started thinking about the mechanics, and wondering why the turning motion of the knob was theoretically the most practical. I also realized I much preferred the bars schools
seem to favor, which are very easy to open no matter what you are carrying. I set about theorizing a lever that fully depressed, rather than rotating about the axis--
a person could rest their forearm on the handle and depress it, then pull towards themselves. The three minutes ended as I was thinking about what would allow a wheelchair-bound user to easily open a door.
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When it came time to share, I realized I had a totally different interpretation of this assignment. My neighbor had sketched a handle to match the aesthetics
of his bathroom. The person across from me had colored in multiple
patterns. It turns out this assignment was really just supposed to be a
small doodle-- to draw a handle you liked. But to me, this
assignment left a large impact-- even a year later, I think
about the inconspicuous door handle, and how even the
most commonplace of items can house many flaws
that we simply ignore because we fail to even
consider that they could be improved.
HOBBIES
In my time outside of work and studies (not much), I love to play music and compose/arrange pieces to play with my friends and family. I am also in the gymnastics club at Northwestern. I've played tennis competitively for most of my life, and was on swim team in high school.
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I love learning about many things, from prehistoric ecosystems to different types of knots. I also spend time designing and creating things-- gadgets to organize things around my room or the house, or just playing with mechanisms.
MUSIC
Music has been a part of my life for longer than
I can remember. My mom performed as a professional
violinist to pay for her expenses while in college and med school.
My grandma, a nationally recognized piano teacher, taught my sister
and I when we were little. I also started violin around that age,
then decided I wanted to play cello instead when I was 6.
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I performed and competed on piano for about 10 years, and I still do
on cello. I sat first chair in the highest orchestra in my high school,
Northside College Prep, for three years-- we won IHSA state
competition all three years. I also sat first chair in the
Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra highest orchestra in 2020-2021.
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I also performed on
trumpet and French
horn for years, and
studied theremin,
percussion, and recorder
variants. Recently I have
been interested in
traditional Chinese
music, experimenting
with guzheng, and learning
erhu seriously as another
main performance instrument.
What
CHINESE
Means to Me
My mom's parents were both born in China and moved to the US early in their lives. My dad's family has been in the US for generations. Growing up in America, I was often bullied for being Chinese. I tried to distance myself from my cultural inheritance. As my household spoke only English, it wasn't particularly hard.
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It wasn't until after my grandparents passed that I started
thinking more deeply about who I was-- and the fact that I
barely knew any of my own history. I realized that for the
sake of trying to fit in with the world around me, I had
given up everything that made me who I was.
​
I have been doing my best to make up for this
recently. I started taking Chinese at Northwestern-- the
accelerated heritage track, despite knowing almost no Chinese,
while the other students all spoke Chinese at home-- with the
thought I could keep up if I simply worked twice as hard.
This is my third year of taking Chinese as an extra class, not
counted towards my degree. I was even offered a scholarship
last summer for a program at Peking University, one of the
best schools in China. I've learned a lot more than just the
language, and I'm planning to continue learning Chinese
on my own after college, and keep learning more
about who I am.