Finding Boundary Layers: Rocio Compton Student Profile

“I figured it was worth a shot,” she says. “And then I just loved it.”

“I would get really frustrated with classes and just not understanding,” Rocio "Rocky" Compton says of her early experience in electrical engineering. “And I thought to a certain extent that that was just engineering in general.”

She had chosen the field for practical reasons. She liked math. She liked science. Engineering seemed like a logical path. But as the coursework deepened, the material never quite clicked. The frustration built into something heavier: maybe this simply was engineering. Maybe she did not belong.

Switching to mechanical engineering added an extra year to her bachelor’s degree. It also clarified everything. The concepts felt tangible. The resistance she had felt before eased. What she had taken as a personal limitation was, instead, a mismatch.

That shift eventually led her into research.

After taking a class with Raúl Bayoán Cal, she received an email suggesting she consider joining his lab. Several friends were already working there. “I figured it was worth a shot,” she says. “And then I just loved it.”

Now a graduate researcher in mechanical engineering at Portland State University, Compton studies fluid mechanics in renewable energy systems, focusing on large-scale solar farms. When vast arrays of panels cover flat land, they interrupt the natural flow of wind. Air that once moved evenly across open terrain is redirected and reshaped. Her work examines how those new patterns form and quantifies the changes.

Raul and Rocky on Wind Energy

Air that once moved evenly across open terrain is redirected and reshaped.

Progress in that work rarely arrives in dramatic flashes. More often, it unfolds gradually. “I wouldn’t say I necessarily have… a lot of aha moments,” she explains. “I look at it for three hours, and then I’m starting to get it.” Understanding builds layer by layer, as data that once seemed abstract begins to take shape.

Some lessons happen in motion. In the wind tunnel, she and a labmate once spent days troubleshooting cameras that refused to focus correctly. They adjusted equipment, recalibrated settings and worked through the problem together. “We kept each other sane,” she says. The experience reinforced something she values deeply about her lab’s culture: collaboration.

She has heard stories of graduate environments where students guard ideas out of fear someone else might claim them. That has not been her experience. In her lab, she says, people help each other, share information, and learn together.

Continuing into graduate study required its own recalibration. Engineering had initially appealed to her in part because of its practical stability. Staying in school meant choosing sustained inquiry over immediate certainty. It was a decision to invest more time in questions she found genuinely compelling. As she puts it, it meant deciding to “do this thing that I’m really passionate about.”

In her lab, “we kept each other sane,” she says.

She will finish her master’s degree this spring and continue into a Ph.D., where new experiments await. Planning them, she notes, rarely follows a straight line. “There might be 17 problems that I am totally unaware of that make it take three months,” she says. Research demands patience with the unknown.

As a teaching assistant for freshman mechanical engineering students, she now spends time with those just beginning the path she once questioned. Her advice is direct: “Try out anything they’re interested in with an open mind.” Research may fit. It may not. The only way to know is to try.

What drives her forward is the scale of the unanswered questions. “There’s just so much that we don’t know about renewables,” she says. If enough researchers tackle small pieces of the puzzle, she believes, those fragments can begin to form a clearer picture of an energy transition.

If she could speak to her 17-year-old self, the message would be simple: “Trust my gut and go with what feels right.” The extra year, the discipline switch and the decision to stay with her curiosity all required uncertainty, but each moved her closer to work that fits.

For Compton, engineering no longer feels like something to endure. It feels like something to build, question by question.

“There might be 17 problems that I am totally unaware of that make it take three months,” she says. Research demands patience with the unknown.