Caspar Floryan came to Cornell’s College of Engineering for its flexibility. “It offers a lot of freedom in terms of the courses you can take and how you can specialize,” he says. “There are double majors, minors, various specializations, and a huge number of electives you can take.”
Besides his major in Engineering Physics, Caspar is minoring in Biomedical Engineering and taking French courses, which he figures will come in handy if he wants to get a government job back home in Canada. He hopes to someday help design things like artificial hearts and robotic prosthetics.
Working on Cornell’s Snake Arm team is putting Caspar closer to that goal. A snake arm is like a robotic snake—thin and flexible, but strong. Just a few millimeters in diameter, Cornell’s snake arm could be used to repair jet engines without taking them apart, inspect nuclear reactors, or defuse bombs. On the mechanical subgroup, Caspar is doing theoretical modeling to predict how building the arm with various materials and dimensions will affect its functioning.
“It’s actually surprisingly close so far. When I first did my analysis, I thought ‘There’s no way it will perform like this,’ because I had to use all these assumptions in my calculations,” he says. “But I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised. We’ve never done anything like this before, but it’s working.”
Caspar has also spent time on the Cornell University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team, helping to build a robotic submarine for an annual international competition. The team won the overall competition in 2003, and has won the design and implementation award for the last five years.
It’s no surprise Caspar is so involved with student project teams, considering his dad is J. Maciej Floryan, professor and chair of the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at The University of Western Ontario. “When I was little he would always take me to the labs of the project teams,” says Caspar. “I’ve always wanted to get involved with project teams—it’s just too interesting to not get involved!”
As co-chair for Engineering’s Peer Advising Program, Caspar counsels new students to get involved with student groups too, even if they don’t think they have the time. “Go to the info sessions or meetings and if you want to do it, just do it,” he says. “In the end, you might be tired, but it’s just for four years and I think it’s worth it. You’ll acquire memories you wouldn’t have otherwise.”
