Community.
Building relationships with STudents and Industry
As an enrolled tribal member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and as UW American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) chapter secretary I am proud to have served 3 years as a mentor for the UW First Nations Launch team. Despite Native Americans making up 2.9% of the US population, only 0.4% of US STEM bachelors recipients identify as Native. I have worked hard to connect passionate indigenous engineering students with manufacturing resources, work spaces, and funding they need to compete in this national competition. I have had the great honor to teach composite workshops describing fabrication methods for different material systems, provide access student workspaces, and help connected our UW AISES chapter with the Seattle AISES professional chapter resulting in a generous donation to support our passionate team of engineers. Our team achieved 1st place in 2023 and 3rd in 2024 with additional awards for safety [2024], and team spirit [2023+2024] (a metric of collaboration as decided by the other competing teams).
Articles:
Students preform final assembly of high powered rocket motor before flight.
First Nations Launch 2023, 1st place rocket!
UW AISES FNL team celebrates the successful recovery of their competition rocket.
DESIGN, BUILD, FLY
I have also served 3 years as a mentor for the UW Design Build Fly team. I’m proud to have been a part of our teams expansion to include a new “Materials and Test” sub-team, and to teach some of the MSE core principles to a ambitious group of engineering students. Crashes are common in RC and Rocketry and I always make sure to emphasize that learning from a crash is just as important as celebrating a success. The club has progressively climbed the leader board, 9th place in 2022, to 5th place in 2023, and 3rd in 2024.