‘Every Feature Is Intentional’: Designing and Building Inside and Outside the Classroom
There is a certain allure, Olisaemaka Nzeribe (ME ’26) says, to designing and building your own contraptions.
“I like the idea of not needing to buy everything I own in the future,” says Nzeribe, who will graduate on May 16, 2026, with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. “The idea of understanding the way things work, being able to fix things, making things on your own. And if you need a really niche product for a specific thing, being able to make it yourself.”
Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, Nzeribe enjoyed building things but didn’t get much of an opportunity to tackle complex mechanisms. He arrived at Illinois Tech at the age of 16, having skipped a year of middle school.
During his second year at Illinois Tech, Nzeribe received the M. A. and Lila Self Leadership Academy Scholarship, a full-ride scholarship program aimed at identifying undergraduate students with leadership potential. His leadership potential was realized in spring 2024 when he was elected president of the Illinois Tech chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers.
Taking the reins of an organization whose industry connections had been weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic, Nzeribe says he was able to re-establish many of those connections; organize a mentorship program with Lincolnshire, Illinois-based Zebra Technologies; and bolster monthly event attendance from single digits to dozens.
But while he has shown his leadership potential outside of the classroom, inside he has continually gravitated toward product development and design.
“I love the aspect of designing a product for a specific use,” he says. “In engineering, the more you learn about the way things are designed, you come to realize that every single feature is designed for a purpose. Everything is intentional. That’s something that really intrigued me.”
Nzeribe came to admire appliance companies such as SharkNinja and Whirlpool, which make concerted efforts to get user feedback in order to improve their designs.
“It all has to do with user experience,” Nzeribe says. “The difference between an average product and a very good product has to do with user experience: How intuitive is it to use? And it might not be big technological changes. It’s slight mechanical changes, like the way they design the curve of a door handle.”
Nzeribe has put those ideas to the test while he has been at Illinois Tech, including earning first place at the Armour R&D Research Expo for his project, titled “Understanding Stable Bipedal Movements in Robots.” Under the guidance of Assistant Professor Nelson Rosa, who purchased a bipedal, child-sized robot for his program, Nzeribe ran experiments on how to raise the robot’s center of mass to have it better simulate walking and to use less energy.
“A lot of robots, especially smaller-than-human robots, find it hard to achieve human-like walking gates. They’re always walking in a crouched-legged position, which is very inefficient,” Nzeribe says.
Beyond his work with Rosa, Nzeribe has received additional design experience during internships at Arke Inc., where he made retrofit kits to turn bikes into ebikes, and at Cupp Golf, where he worked on a golf swing training device.
After graduation, he will begin his career at Hatch, a product development and contract manufacturing company. It’s attractive, Nzeribe says, because he’ll be able to work on a wide range of products, allowing him to tinker with countless components, and—hopefully—understand and perfect the purposes of hundreds of individually designed machines.
