Rami El-Haibe, a graduate student pursuing his master’s degree in mechanical engineering, is eager to graduate this spring. El-Haibe first earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Houston, and he cited his experiences with faculty and research opportunities during those years as factors that inspired him to remain at the Cullen College of Engineering for his MS as well.
El-Haibe has known since high school that he was interested in pursuing an education in mechanical engineering, due mainly to his love of science and space exploration.
“I looked up to NASA when I was younger, and I found engineering to be the best path for me to contribute to this fascination,” he said. It also made choosing a university simple.
“UH is already a fantastic school. Being in my hometown of Houston meant that I could still go home on the weekends, and it felt really nice to know that I could still be around my parents and my family,” El-Haibe said.
Though the first couple of years were difficult — in fact, El-Haibe said that he considered dropping out in the first two years of pursuing his bachelor’s degree — getting more involved around campus helped solidify not only his desire to stay, but to further pursue his master’s degree.
“I’ve really enjoyed a lot of the experiences that weren’t necessarily directly related to my education. Some of the things I will remember most are the involvement I had in clubs, as a teaching assistant… The more involved I got, the more I wanted to continue,” he added. “When I graduate, I’m not really going to remember things like the exam grades I got. I’m going to really remember the interactions I had with my mentors and my involvement on campus.”
El-Haibe cites both of those examples as sources of “really good memories” for him at the University of Houston, as well as experiences that “made me a better communicator and someone who’s better at being involved and being able to work on the team.”
“That’s what I enjoyed the most: ‘leveling up’ as an adult professional and figuring out who I am and what I’m going to take away from my experiences at UH.”
His experience as a teaching assistant with the First Year Experience (FYA) program also granted the benefits of seeing both sides of mentorship: having excellent mentors as well as being one to newer students. El-Haibe’s group of junior and senior colleagues allowed him to be a mentor to freshman students while receiving further guidance from the cohort of FYE-involved faculty and professors.
“I think Dr. Burleson was one of the best mentors I had in my entire academic career,” he added.
His research experiences also played a large role in shaping the new professional El-Haibe will soon be graduating as. His research work with an Enbridge-associated electromagnetometry project “really put [him] out there.”
“I started off not knowing how to do anything, and I was working with PhD students as an undergraduate. I was able to help on that project and handle that responsibility; I wasn’t treated any different as an undergraduate or as a graduate student. That was really necessary, because it allowed me to grow in such a meaningful way,” he said.
After graduation, El-Haibe is “particularly interested” in staying in energy or oil and gas as he gets started on the next phase of his career, and is pleased to be joining MIRATECH — “an industry leader that provides advanced, cost-effective, reliable, and mission-critical emission and acoustical solutions for natural gas, diesel, bi-fuel, biofuel, and biogas powered engines” — as an operational engineer.