Mohammad Faizaan ’23

During the tour of campus at First Days my freshman year, I heard that Sawyer Library had a room full of 3D printers, a VR headset, video gaming rooms, and production studios. It sounded awesome! But in the whirlwind of starting college, learning how to college, and figuring out where the good study spots were, I forgot about it.

That changed about a month into the semester during my Chemistry 151 class. We had a virtual lab in the library and were handed these tiny 3D-printed water molecules. I was fascinated. They weren’t just models—this represented water! Something we drink every single day and is vital to sustaining life. Someone had taken the time to turn their PyMOL rendering of water tangible. That moment is what led me back to the Makerspace. 

Walking into the room for the first time felt like stepping into a playground for creativity and experimentation. I was hooked. I loved tech, had always been the kind of kid to open up old phones to see what was inside (sometimes even managing to put them back together—other times… not so much. Sorry Dad!). Even though I was leaning toward medicine, not engineering or computer science, the Makerspace gave me an outlet to nurture that side of me—the part that loved to build, break, problem-solve, and tinker.

During that first visit, I met Matthew Roychowdhury ’21, who would later become my student mentor. He mentioned that they were hiring, and I happened to be looking for a campus job. After meeting with the Director of OIT, Jonathan Leamon, he handed me a key. Neither of us knew that this key would unlock a really formative part of my Williams experience. 

From day one, the Makerspace was a place where curiosity came first. You didn’t need to know how additive manufacturing works or a background in engineering; all you needed was a willingness to try, to ask questions, and to experiment. As such, I started small: printing fun models, learning the quirks of different printers, experimenting with different filament types. Eventually, I was assembling machines, running workshops, and helping classmates bring ideas to life—and occasionally causing disasters. 

I’ll never forget the infamous Blob of Death. We, at the makerspace, had been struggling with build-plate adhesion for a while my first year. After trying to mess around with different options—turning up the build plate temperature, attaching masking tape, or using a glue stick—I decided to solve it my own way: slow down the print by 80%, crank up the build plate temperature, and let it run overnight. Little did I know. I came back the next morning to find out that my model had not adhered. The filament kept coming, thus forming a giant blob that melted into the extruder head and damaged it. I felt terrible. But it was also a turning point. I learned how to fix the extruder, how to not fix adhesion (pro tip: use glue sticks!), and most importantly, how to take responsibility for mistakes and learn from them. 

Later, I became a student manager, which meant mentoring others, troubleshooting constant printer issues, and helping lead through unpredictable challenges like COVID-era policies when the library would cut power at 11 p.m., destroying all overnight prints. We got creative, supported each other, and laughed through the chaos. It was teamwork, community, and a kind of joyful resilience (which we needed when all printers were down). 

What stood out to me, however, was how interdisciplinary the Makerspace was. It wasn’t just about technology. It was a space for expression, creativity, learning, and most importantly experimentation. I used the VR room to walk around a chemical model of a protein and explore ß-sheets and α-helices. I became an architect for a day when I helped design a room in blender (and gave structural, get it?, advice on why we wouldn’t be able to print a model with a floating roof). I saw studio art majors, computer scientists, and biology students all using the same machines for completely different goals. That kind of intellectual cross-pollination is rare, and it’s something that I now realize prepared me well for the kind of collaboration and creative thinking needed to solve problems. 

Now, as a medical student, I’m not building 3D models every day, but I am working to solve problems, think critically across disciplines, and striving to be creative in doing so.  Medicine, like the Makerspace, is about adaptability, collaboration, and understanding how different systems work together. The hands-on experiences I had building, fixing, experimenting, and supporting others in the Makerspace genuinely helped shape the kind of thinker—and person—I am today. 

In fact, one of the most unexpected things the Makerspace gave me was a sense of advocacy even during my first days in undergrad. When I first joined, our machines were outdated and constantly breaking. As fun as it was to come up with creative solutions, we needed more reliable tools. So, Roychowdhury ’21 and I came up with a case for a new printer, presented it, and learned how to effectively present it to Leamon. Not only did Leamon help us purchase two new printers, but this experience helped me grow closer to him—to the point wherein he wrote one of my letters of recommendation for medical school! That experience helped shape the confidence I relied on for my undergraduate advocacy and current day advocacy in religiously informed healthcare, Muslim representation in medicine, and health equity, more broadly. 

The Makerspace gave me a space to be curious, to grow into a leader, and to build confidence in skills I didn’t even know I had. It helped shape not just how I work, but how I think, and who I want to be. I’m endlessly grateful for the community I found there, and I hope future students continue to find the same joy, creativity, and purpose—whether their path lies in tech, art, science, medicine, or something else entirely.

Mohammad Faizaan
Rush Medical College ’28
Williams College ’23
BA in Chemistry and Religion