ENGR 0715 Engineering Applications for Society

Asher Finkel

Bio:

I am Asher Finkel, although that is not the first name given to me. When I was born my parents for religious reasons wouldn't give the hospital my name, so the hospital put on my birth certificate Baby Boy Goldstein. Often I wish that was my name, however I must concede that Asher is just as awesome.

I'm from Lexington, KY born and raised (except for a year I lived in Malaysia and another year in Australia). My family has traveled the globe, I often count how many countries I've been to and I get somewhere between 14 and 17.

I have a few hobbies that are worth mentioning. The most important started the summer after my first year in high school. Someone made fun of my rhythm. So like all normal people I retaliated by picking up beatboxing. I've been beatboxing ever since, and I'd like to say I'm pretty good. Recently I've been learning the harmonica, which is just a fun instrument to play. I recommend it to everyone. I’m also a big fan of photography. I’m the kind of person who sees everything in respect to what kind of picture it would make. My last serious hobby is Ultimate Frisbee. I play on the Pitt B Team, and I absolutely love it.

For the salient interests, I like technology (huge surprise, I know), more specifically, entertainment technology. My dream job would be building/designing the hardware they use in recording studios. Really, I wouldn’t mind doing anything from designing the next better TV to creating the new graphics card technology to making the best audio speakers on the market.

I came to University of Pittsburgh because I didn’t like CMU. I was visiting CMU and decided it was a good school but too high pressure for not the right reasons. On the same trip, I thought I might as well look at Pitt. I really liked it. I visited later in the spring, and I fell in love. I am now a Computer Engineer with a minor in Music. That’s my story, hope you liked it.

Team Project:

Design & Develop Online Interactive Scholarship Information Website

Community Partner:

University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering

Team Members:

  1. Michael DePhillips
  2. Andy Kenny
  3. Alex Patterson
  4. Charles Saunders

Project Links:

  • http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/: This links to a reference manual for MySQL which is the database management system we will be using for our project.
  • http://www.php.net/docs.php: This links to a reference manual for php which is the computer language we will be using to write our Team Web Page.
  • http://www.pitt.edu/~oafa/schlrs.html: This links to the University of Pittsburgh's scholarship page. Our Project involves working with the scholarships for Pitt.