Erin Fitzgerald, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the founder and chair of Women of Whiting, a graduate student organization to support female students, says she values her tablet PC. The small laptop permits her to operate the computer with a digital pen or a fingertip instead of a keypad and a mouse. “A tablet PC is physically easily manipulated, the screen spins around; I can download papers and PDFs and write on those and store on the soft copy instead of having piles of papers around,” she says. Fitzgerald first started using a tablet PC when her faculty advisor, Frederick Jelinek, the director of the Center for Language and Speech Processing, sent her to work in Prague for a semester. “We thought that if we could write directly on the screen, it would help us work remotely,” she says. “We had Web cameras set up. I could directly draw on the tablet so as we spoke he would have the image appear on his screen.”

Nikhil Ram Mohan, a rising junior studying applied math and statistics, believes that any well-engineered object should include thoughtful, simple technology. For that reason, this Dubai native picks his DeLonghi espresso maker: “It’s simple, it uses the basic ideas of pressure and heat—things that everyone understands—and it gives you a great cup of coffee in the morning.”