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By Melanie Johnson

A run of A+ grades, a collection of neckties and a prom king crown. These are the key touch points in Andy Le’s life story to this point.

But to understand his passion for robotics, his fascination with how technology works, and his hopes for the future, you merely need to picture an 8-year-old boy curled up asleep next to an iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner.

The mechanical engineering senior recalled sitting at the end of the long dinner table at his aunt’s Northern California home eating a bowl of cereal when something interrupted the quiet.

“I heard a whirring sound to the right, and down the hallway I see coming an iRobot Roomba,” Le says. “I dropped my spoon and got up and followed it for four or five hours. I kept walking with it. I was so amazed by it.”

He stayed by that Roomba’s side until he fell asleep next to it while watching it charge. A dozen years later, Le’s love of robotics remains, and he continues to pursue his passion in his courses and co-curricular activities.

For the first two years at Cal Poly ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½, Le was involved in the . The Kellogg Honors College student and President’s Scholar also was active in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, first serving on the organization’s junior committee then moving on to the board as the social events chair.

In his junior year, Le and a fivemember team completed their senior project, building an untethered isoperimetric soft robot — for nonengineers, it is sort of akin to the inflatable robot in the Disney animated film “Big Hero 6,” only with a different shape.

The robot Le and company created is made of inflated tubes in the form of four triangles linked together. A roller module on each end of the tubes helps the robot change shape and move.

Le and the team reached out to the Stanford University professors who built the original robot to collaborate on the construction of their senior project, with Le serving as one of the project leads and the chief presenter.

Their human-sized robot won the best engineering research project award at CPP’s Research, Scholarship and Creative Activities Conference in 2025. It also received recognition at the 2025 CPP Mechanical Engineering Department Showcase, was well received at the 2025 Western Regional Honors Council Conference in Denver and represented Cal Poly ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ at the CSU Systemwide Student Research Competition at Cal Poly Humboldt.

“I love presenting because I love to share my love of robots,” Le says. “I like seeing the expression on people’s faces. At these conferences, you aren’t presenting to a bunch of engineers. You are presenting to people who have a general knowledge of what a robot can do, but they don’t know in detail.”

For the past two years, Le has also been involved with the student-led Northrop Grumman Collaboration Project. Le joined the Unmanned Ground Vehicle team and designed a robotic claw that could help with search and rescue missions.

While his college projects have come a long way from his middle school dreams of working in prosthetics and biotechnology, Le’s central motivation for working in robotics remains the same. “What robots are supposed to do is help people,” Le says.

And Le is a people person, a craver of connection. It’s one of the reasons why he enjoys giving presentations.

When he was a young boy, he accompanied his mom to her office when she couldn’t find a babysitter.

“My mom told me that I would almost always be walking around,” Le says. “I would go to different floors and talk to her coworkers about their lives, marriages and kids. A lot of them would tell me, ‘Andy, you have an old soul.’”

Those visits to his mom’s office helped Le learn to communicate with people, and he felt especially connected to people older than himself. From his dad, known as the “life of the party,” Le learned how to have fun and live life to the fullest, something that helps combat stress and draws people to him.

Another quirk that has helped Le connect with people has to do with his sense of style. When he was a freshman at Chino High School, his mom suggested he wear a tie for picture day. One day with the tie turned into a week, then a month, then a semester and now the past eight years, earning him the nickname “The Tie Guy” in high school and popularity that helped him become prom king.

“That was my alias like Batman, and I loved it,” Le says. “When I introduced myself to people as Andy, I would say, ‘I also answer to “The Tie Guy.’”

Le wore a tie while hiking in Yosemite with the Kellogg Honors College, and during a summer engineering program at CPP, a special category for "best dressed" was created just to recognize him.

“It started out because I liked compliments. I can’t tell you when it shifted, but it eventually shifted to me wearing it to stand out,” says Le, whose tie collection has grown to 99. “In standing out, people can remember you more and you can have better conversations. It’s a conversation starter and relationship builder.”

Le also is a striver. In elementary school, he vowed to always push for A+ and was able to maintain that through high school, where he was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.”

At CPP, he added a math minor for a bit more of a challenge.

Mechanical Engineering Professor Babak Boloury had Le in his Strength of Materials and Dynamics courses and describes him as diligent, hardworking and determined. Le is the kind of student who strives to be the best in his class and wants to master what he is learning, Boloury says.

“Andy is very special in that regard. He is really into studying and engineering and not letting go of something he doesn’t understand,” Boloury says. “He is very different from most students you see nowadays. When there was something he did not understand, he would go and start to learn about it on his own.”

Le, who wants to work in industry and eventually pursue his master’s degree, says he has always put pressure on himself to be the best at everything he tries. That push, that drive, that determination is just who he has always been since the days of following that iRobot Roomba vacuum around. He is fueled by his own expectations but fights to keep them tempered at the same time, he says.

“At this point, I am trying to finish off the streak of good grades and holding high expectations for myself,” Le says. “I just want to succeed, whatever success means. I can’t define what success means. I probably won’t know it when I’ve reached the goal. A job that I love is a goal.”