![]() ![]() While she went out of her way to credit every member of the team, Elizabeth Reynoso said in an email that Conrad and Kissinger, in particular, had “connected” with her son on a level beyond his injuries. and see Austin in there, working with those little fingers.”Ĭonsidering all Julian had lost in the tragic car accident, Conrad said, “You couldn’t just say, ‘Oh, I think I’ll do this part-time.’?” As Koos recalled, “I’d walk past the lab at 7 a.m. Koos, the president of QL+, was on his way to a meeting to showcase the club to new students.Īfter joining the club, Conrad was chosen as design team leader for the Hands For Julian project, which turned into basically a full-time job. Harry Koos, a graduate of Casa Grande High School, hadn’t seen Conrad since they attended Penngrove Elementary School together a decade earlier. After accepting, that undergraduate asked him, “Hey, did you go to Penngrove?” Strolling on campus early in his first quarter, he offered a helping hand to another student who was walking by carrying lab equipment. If you wanted anything extra, you went out and worked for it,” he said.Īfter pulling straight A’s in junior college, he arrived at Cal Poly in September 2018 as a third-year student. “Finances were pretty tough for as long as I can remember,” said Conrad, who has worked in his family’s automotive shop, for a catering company, as an art instructor and tutor in a math lab, to name a few of the jobs he’s held since he was 12. With his parents unable to afford a laptop, Austin Conrad went to school early, or stayed late, to use the school’s computers. When he was in junior high, his mother, Colleen Conrad, recalled students were told they needed computers for schoolwork. Money was often tight for his family, which in the span of three or four years lost two houses in Sonoma County plus a business to bankruptcy. He always had the smarts for a four-year university, but lacked the financial resources. If no one in the club recognized Conrad, that’s because he’d spent the previous four years taking engineering courses at Santa Rosa Junior College. “He was exactly what we needed on the team.” “Austin (Conrad) was incredibly charismatic, smart, and had this very strong energy about him,” Kissinger recalled. ![]() One of them, in particular, leapt out to Kissinger. Seventy students applied for the eight spots on the team. Those different levels of disability required two different prosthetics, said Ryan Kissinger, the Cal Poly senior and team co-leader who postponed his graduation by a semester to devote himself to the project known as Hands For Julian. He had no fingers on his left hand, while parts of four digits remained on his right hand. Julian’s case came to the attention of Quality of Life Plus, or QL+, a Cal Poly club whose members make specialized devices for people facing physical challenges. Julian’s mother, Elizabeth, also was seriously injured, but survived. In addition to losing his father and two siblings, he suffered burns over 35% of his body. That boy, Julian Reynoso, was a passenger in a minivan that was T-boned in Los Angeles by a drunk driver in April 2018. These qualities made Conrad, now 23, one of the most valuable members of a team of Cal Poly students who spent eight months, starting in October, designing and building a pair of bionic hands for a 10-year-old burn victim. To those traits, add what he calls his “dumb superpower”: the ability to function at a high level on little to no sleep. He is creative, resourceful and hardworking. He describes his bedroom - the unfinished, detached garage of his family’s Penngrove home - as “a workshop with a bed.” “That’s just kind of how my brain works.”Ī third-generation automobile mechanic and product of his high school’s visual fine arts program, Conrad always has been interested in making things. “If we just cut (the arm) off,” he wondered, “could I build a new one? What would it take to do that?”īionic arms, as it turned out, were “really hard,” he said with a laugh, “so I just went with the surgery.” But he did spend considerable time reading about prosthetics. “Sometimes, surgeries fail,” said Conrad, now a fourth-year engineering student at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Before undergoing surgery to repair the shoulder, he looked for an alternative solution. By the time he was a senior at Santa Rosa High School, Austin Conrad had dislocated his left shoulder 22 times. ![]()
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