Matthew Hays, Hanszen College Senior
Matthew Hays is a senior at Hanszen College majoring in Mechanical Engineering and Classical Studies. As a MECHE, he has had much experience with MATLAB, a multi-paradigm numerical computing environment and programming language that many engineering majors and those in other STEM fields are required to learn and continue using throughout their studies.
Hays says, “MATLAB is extremely useful for calculations and any situation where matrix manipulation is needed or the data can be manipulated in matrix form. When I took CAAM 210 freshman year, I had no idea how useful and integral to my major MATLAB would become. During my junior spring, every single MECH class I took: Control Systems, Heat Transfer, and 
Mechanical Design required the use of MATLAB in some capacity, and I’ve used it in every class where calculations were required since sophomore fall.”
Discourse regarding MATLAB often turns to plain number-crunching when compared to other programming languages, but students still come in contact with interesting projects. Hays describes his two favorite projects in MATLAB in CAAM 210 his freshman year: “One was showing the path that every four digit number took to get to Kaprekar’s Constant [6174] and the other was building a node network to find the smallest set of nodes that defined the network. Both of them were helpful in discovering MATLAB for myself and how it worked and at the same time produced pretty cool final results.”
Starting this year, Rice has signed an agreement with MathWorks (producer of MATLAB and Simulink) for a Total Academic Headcount (TAH) license and will be providing campus-wide access to MATLAB and essential toolboxes; it will also be available to download for students who wish to learn it on their own time. As a scripting language with basic syntax, MATLAB employs universal programming habits and is a great choice for a first coding language.
Hays says, “As far as learning the language, MATLAB is not that difficult, but truly mastering it and understanding its full potential is something else entirely. The difficulties come in knowing what commands exist and if what you are trying to do is built into MATLAB. Your input needs to be in a specific format, so there is a lot of googling to find the correct input. However, the built-in help command is a lifesaver when it comes to checking the capabilities of functions or whether they exist…the abilities of MATLAB are vast, and if you plan to do any engineering in the future, learning MATLAB basics could come in handy.”