Santiago Gomez, Sociology to Electrical & Computer Engineering

Santiago Gomez has always been fascinated by the patterns created by our social relationships, social interactions, and culture. As an undergraduate at Boston University in 2009, Santiago settled on sociology as his undergraduate major. “I wanted to find something that really spoke to me, and helped me understand how society functions,” said Santiago.

After graduating from BU, Santiago dabbled in higher education admissions at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, developing technology tools to help smooth business processes in the office. He began thinking about pursuing a career in technology and knew BU’s LEAP was the key to reaching this goal. 

“I wanted to get my master’s in computer engineering specifically, and there was only one program for computer engineering that I knew about: BU’s LEAP. It was an easy decision,” said Santiago. Santiago was confident LEAP had the mechanisms and support in place to achieve an understanding of society through an engineering lens.

“It’s a really fun experience to go through those foundational courses. Whether you’re building mechanisms or a computer, you have to know how circuits function. Those courses were incredibly exciting. As a student who was seeking to transition to engineering, it was very refreshing to know you can just jump into solid engineering work at the start of your program,” said Santiago.

Santiago felt his commitment to use engineering as a tool to better understand society aligned closely with the BU College of Engineering’s values. His vision came to fruition when he encountered racist language in one of his engineering textbooks. Santiago wrote to the textbook’s publisher, Pearson, and called for the language to be changed. Pearson responded by withholding distribution of the textbook until the language could be revised. Santiago has received praise from BU’s engineering community for working to strike out racist terminology in engineering academia.

“What attracted me to this college was that it has a societal principle behind it — the belief that the school is not just teaching young minds to create and innovate new devices, but to do that innovation in the context of how to advance humanity for the better. I took that to heart; it was one of the motivating principles for why I decided to pick up my pen and write that letter to Pearson,” said Santiago.

Santiago is also an active member of the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground at BU, an institution dedicated to understanding the different lived experiences of all people and finding common ground among those differences. Through his involvement in the center, Santiago hopes to continue to explore our societal systems with his engineering education.