Hi, I am Ethan, a first-year structural engineering masters student. I graduated from Berkeley in 2021 with a degree in Civil Engineering, and I am originally from China.
Last summer I had an internship with ARUP Shenzhen and I had to do a lot of design work using Rhino. During that process, I was introduced to Grasshopper and learned its basics. I was quite surprised and fascinated by the rich functionality and the useful results that it provided. To be honest, I had always thought of Rhino + Grasshopper more as an architectural tool rather than a structural tool before the internship. Once, I had to design a very irregular structure, and Grasshopper saved my day as I used it to easily make different iterations with minor parameter changes. Thus, I was exposed to the term “parametric design.”
Now that I am fully aware of how powerful parametric design can be, I am really excited to take this course on it. I hope to master Rhino and Grasshopper this quarter, so that I can analyze and optimize structural designs more efficiently, and hopefully put it to use in my next internship at SOM this summer.