For years, Nick Martin ’16 has wanted to work in the aerospace industry.
“I’ve always liked building things,” he says. “Even as a kid, I was interested in spacecraft and airplanes. When we went on trips, my favorite part of the trip was flying.”
When he was in high school in Manhattan, Kansas, he had narrowed down his interests to either mechanical or electrical engineering. An engineering camp at Kansas State University helped him settle on the former.
Now a senior on a four-year U VM Presidential Scholarship, he has made it through some of the most challenging classes in mechanical engineering, including Thermodynamics and Fluid Dynamics with William Louisos and Heat Transfer with Yves Dubief.
“Dr. Louisos is known to be a challenging teacher, but his teaching style is a great match for the way I learn. His tests are always hard, which inspires me to buckle down and learn what I really need to learn,” Martin says.
“And what I really liked about Professor Dubief is that he stressed the ‘problem-solving approach.’ It wasn’t like, ‘Here’s a problem you’re going to see all the time in the workplace, so when you’re on the job, you can just ‘cut and paste’ from your engineering notes and be done with it,’ ” he explains.
Instead, Martin and his classmates developed the skills and knowledge to identify a problem, break it down and analyze it piece by piece, and apply scientific and mathematical theory and data to arrive at a solution
“We might not have seen the problem before, but we knew how to step back and look at the big picture and draw on everything we had learned to solve the problem,” he says.
Martin has already observed how this problem-solving approach might play out in the workplace. He spent the summer working in Professor Douglas Fletcher’s plasma diagnostics laboratory, redesigning a probe used to test the thermal resistance of materials such as those used in spacecraft.
“I made all the parts with SolidWorks, a CA D program,” he says. “I’ve re-engineered the probe, going through the initial idea to the design phase and on to the construction phase.”
Martin also gained experience through a summer internship with SOH Wind Engineering in Williston, a company that operates the world’s largest anemometer calibration wind tunnel, which is used for testing and calibrating wind sensors and the wind loading on structures. “It’s nice to be able to get an internship where you’re applying what you’ve learned in the classroom,” he says. “You learn how forces interact with objects. ‘If I do this to this, what will happen?’ You start to build an intuition of what will happen.”
He plans to apply some of his undergraduate courses to CEMS’ Accelerated Master’s Degree Program, conduct research at The von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium, and eventually land a job in the aerospace industry.
If he has any advice for future engineering students, it’s this: “Learn to program, because that’s going to be huge,” Martin says. “Everything is moving toward working more with computers, and you need coding skills.”
(This story was from the Fall 2015 issue of SUMMIT. You can read more here.)