Professor Snell teaches Engineering Graphics, the AutoCAD portion of a Civil Engineering lecture/lab series, and two senior design labs. He has a background in architecture, and was the Faculty Construction Manager for the SURE House, Stevens’ winning entry in the 2015 Solar Decathlon. Students and faculty joined together to build the house, and the project was close to carbon-neutral, as Professor Snell’s focus is carbon emission reduction.
Professor Snell’s undergraduate education took place at the University of Texas at Austin. He says that the liberal arts program served him well, because it taught him the communication skills he used when working with other people in architectural design. He owned a residential design firm in North Carolina, where he experimented with different materials to improve the performance of buildings. Professor Snell later earned his Master of Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, focusing on optimizing concrete mixtures.
Professor Snell has been working at Stevens for two and a half years, and works mostly with freshmen. He says that Stevens students are very diligent, hardworking, and are glad to be here, but tend to be very busy and overloaded. His advice for students taking his Engineering Graphics class is to be more creative, because it is the only required engineering course focusing on graphics representation. This is a huge part of engineering, so it is important to get as much out of the class as you can. The class focuses on 2D and 3D modeling in SolidWorks, and how to evolve a concept from a design idea, to a drawing, to a model.
His advice for incoming students is to remember that “college is sort of your last chance to have people focusing on you. If you’re an incoming freshman or an undergraduate at Stevens, it’s all about you – we’re all hired to help you. We’re always looking for students that have initiative and try to help them find the best way to capitalize on that. So really the mindset should be ‘What do I want to do with my life, and how can I use this education to further that?’ … What people care about when you’re done is what you can do and how you can express that skill.”
Professor Snell enjoys playing guitar, tennis, and kayaking. He is also the faculty advisor for Engineers for a Sustainable World, which focuses on how climate change efforts and education.
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