Eric Deng
Hometown: Fremont, CA
College Activities: Club Water Polo, SC Racing (Formula SAE), Robotics Research, Viterbi W.V.T. Rusch Honors Colloquium Moderator
What is your favorite part of USC?
SC has everything that I wanted in a college experience—sports (both for me to participate in as well as teams to root for), academics, the arts, and a diverse group of intelligent peers and faculty. I remember waking up that first Saturday of our first game and looking out of my window, seeing McCarthy Quad covered by a variety of cardinal and gold tents with everyone already excited about that night’s game. The energy that whole day and especially in the Coliseum that night was phenomenal and is an experience that I will never forget. Another interesting part of going to USC are celebrity sightings and on-campus filming—in just a semester, I have heard Bill Clinton speak, talked to former YouTube star Kevjumba about East-Asian religions, and walked out from math lecture onto the set of an Oscar-Mayer commercial.
What activities do you do?
During my first semester at SC, I have gotten heavily involved with SC Racing, Club Water Polo, entrepreneurship, and research. My first semester I did my research in the Combustion Physics Lab studying turbulent combustion; I’ll also be helping develop socially-assistive robots. This upcoming summer, I will be working at Facebook developing mobile-telepresence robots for usage in their data centers as well as throughout their campuses.
Did you always know you wanted to do Electrical Engineering?
I actually switched my major from Mechanical Engineering to Electrical Engineering after getting involved with the electronics team at SC Racing and exploring the opportunities that the EE department at Viterbi has, which was a surprisingly smooth process.
