Aerospace Engineering
Biography
No matter where I go, I carry one thing with me: my engineering mindset. Since my experiences as a part of my elementary school’s Lego robotics team, I have relied on my innate passions for building, analyzing, and storytelling to achieve my personal, academic, and professional goals. As I transition between the collegiate space and industry; however, the new experiences I have gained have revealed that there are problems requiring a much broader perspective to solve, especially in the highly cutting-edge and divergent domains of Aerospace engineering that I seek to pursue. I realized that if I want to make a true and lasting difference, not only in my career but also through serving my community, I need the tools to tackle problems too complex to handle alone or too interdisciplinary to solve with a team of solely engineers. Therefore, what I hope to take away from the Heath IBEP program is more than just an opportunity to extend my perspective into the business world. I hope to gain the skills necessary to reach across disciplines and solve complex problems within incredibly productive teams. That relies on completing two goals. First, I hope to do more than simply be an engineer. I want to be able to use engineering to solve the problems that I am most passionate about. My greatest fear in choosing my major is that I would have to give up on the things I was interested in and only focus on problems that are related to engineering. Second, I hope to nurture my ability to lead a team made up of highly capable individuals from any discipline. Leadership is another big focus of mine during my time at UT as a Haslam Leadership Scholar, so I am always looking for opportunities to develop my leadership and communication with individuals from a variety of backgrounds. As for my more immediate goals, I am working towards gaining experience in making Aeronautics and Astronautics more sustainable and practical overall. If the discipline is to continue to progress in the future, sustainability is one of the largest roadblocks it faces. While I do not know exactly what role I’d like to take up after my three years in the program are up, I know that wherever my career takes me, the skills I develop now are the ones that will allow me to make a real difference no matter where I go.
