I’m interested in the mining industry. If it can’t be grown, it has to be mined. It’s important to me that it’s done safely, in a way that respects the earth.
I’m a sound design major and I’m minoring in music composition. This is my third year at Tech; I transferred from a community college downstate. My grandfather is an alumnus, and I saw the visual and performing arts department and thought, “These are the careers I want to do.” I applied, I was accepted, I drove up here in the fall, I saw an apartment, signed a lease, drove through town, and drove back home. I moved in December during a snowstorm. A nine-hour drive took us 12.
Sometimes my name tag says Taylor 2.0. It’s a running joke with one of my coworkers; basically, we were arguing about who is better at their jobs, and I said, “You’re Taylor and I’m better, so I’m Taylor 2.0 now.” So that’s been my name tag ever since. It’s a fun joke at work and everyone says, “You don’t look like a Taylor.” And I say, “I don’t look like Taylor, but I’m Taylor 2.0, so that’s a different person.”
Somebody who knew someone, who knew someone, convinced me to come to Michigan Tech and here I am — and almost graduated. During O Week I thought I had made the worst decision of my life. The only reason I got up every morning was Army Physical Training (PT).
I’m super into rocketry. In high school, I was the captain of one of the rocket teams and was on the team for three years. Actually, Mr. Ratza, our advisor, also recommended I do the women in engineering Summer Youth Program (SYP), so I attribute a lot to him. I came for SYP the summer into my senior year. Michigan Tech is the only school I applied to. I’m studying mechanical engineering, I’m outreach coordinator of the Keweenaw Rocket Range student organization, and I’m staying over the summer to take classes and be a SYP weekend counselor. In the fall, I’ll be an orientation team leader. I’m a very sociable person, so it’s not hard for me to be outgoing. Just genuine talking—I’m good at that.
The way I got the job (as outreach coordinator) was by raising my hand at the info session. No one else raised their hand. I’m actually really enjoying it. We’re going to New Mexico for a competition in June. Even though I’m really heavy into rocketry and this leadership stuff, I think it’s important to not get focused solely on those things, but rather, be flexible and versatile. I’m also interested in videography. Because mechanical engineering is so broad, I don’t want to specialize myself in the beginning of my college career, I’d rather be open and see where it takes me, and if rocketry doesn’t end up being my career, I can just make it a hobby because I like it; so that’s my advice—flexibility.
There are going to be times where you are going to need to try to figure out how to make ends meet financially, or figure out how you are going to save time to do homework, or just take care of your own mental health and well-being. One of those things you always have to put on the back burner and it can get really exhausting. But if you remember it’s only a couple of years, it can be hard in the moment, but as long as you work through it, it will be okay. I work as a student custodian in the ME-EM. I really like my job. I work 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday. I don’t have to clean bathrooms. I just go around and vacuum rooms, wipe whiteboards off, and other stuff. Other than that, I TA a few classes and I’m the vice president of the Society of Medical Laboratory Scientists club. So when I get home, I make food, shower, go to sleep, wake up, and start it all again. I have to wake up super early, but I have weekends and nights off. And I get to listen to music and podcasts while I’m working. I also do work study for the biology department, so I work on average about 30 hours a week.
My degree has a required fifth-year practicum, if you want to take the board exam to be certified to work in a hospital. I’ll be doing my practicum in July at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in my hometown of Iron Mountain, Michigan. Then I can sit for my boards and go on to work in a hospital. For our senior capstone, we meet twice a week to prepare to take an old version of the board as the final exam. Jobs for my major after graduation typically entail working in a hospital lab, doing research, or working for a corporation in the private sector; but it’s mostly doing patient sample testing to diagnose diseases. A lot of microscopes and machines.
I remember my senior year of high school, I was looking around at different schools and there was nothing super specific about Tech that drew me in, but I liked the location (two hours from home), and I had heard that it was a really good school. A lot of my friends told me it was too expensive and too hard, which made me want to go here even more.
I’m president of the Michigan Tech Women’s Rugby Club and I’m a third-year exercise science major minoring in psychology. Before I came to Michigan Tech, I participated in cross country and track, both for about seven or eight years. But at Tech, I wanted to expand my viewpoint on different sports and join a club team. I first heard about the rugby club through the Orientation Week packet given to incoming students. The team was putting on their annual cookout. Once I was able to meet the team, I instantly fell in love with the people on the team and how welcoming they were. I have officially been on the team for two years and have loved every minute of it.
Our team began in 2012 with only a small handful of girls. We would play games with Northern Michigan University’s women’s team. Once the club grew, we became part of the Great Waters Women’s Rugby Conference in 2016. We vary to having between 12 to 20 girls on our team and are always looking for more. Last year we had about 18 girls when we went down to NashBash, a rugby tournament in Nashville, bringing rugby teams from around the country.
Our biggest season is in the fall, which is when we compete against teams in our conference—Northern, and University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, LaCross, Platteville, and Stout. During both our fall and spring seasons, we practice two times a week for a total of about four hours each week. Outside of practices, our team continues to keep the family atmosphere by having team dinners before games and hanging out with each other as much as we can.
If I hadn’t joined the rugby team here at Tech, I don’t know where I would be, and I know many of the other girls would say the same thing. We all would be lost without this wonderful sport.
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I chose Michigan Tech because it is close to home—I’m from Ishpeming—and the Air Force ROTC program offered something other schools didn’t. I like being close to my mom and five sisters. I came in knowing I wanted to do Air Force ROTC because I have a lot of service members in my family and I want to do something I care about. Right now I’m kind of in the dark about where I’ll go after I graduate and commission into the Air Force. It’s exciting I guess. It’s hard to say if I’ll be career (military); career is typically 20 (years), but I’m 22, so I can’t really fathom that right now. I have a four-year commitment and I’ll see what happens after that.
I run a Physical Training (PT) program five days a week to prep other cadets for Phase I and Phase II exercises (Air Force programs). Exercises, like a Phase I, prepare airmen for battlefield positions. It takes a much more capable individual to be qualified for those positions. I like training people. I like pushing people and helping them become the best versions of themselves; a lot of times, people won’t push themselves until they get a little exposure to training at that level and then they’ll just fall in love with it. Most people don’t enjoy being at that level of discomfort but some do. I like getting people to that point, and you know once they hit that point because I don’t have to check in with them and make sure they’re coming to PT in the morning because they’ll be there five minutes early; that’s my favorite thing to see—somebody that’s killing it all the way. I picked exercise science (as my major) because I was an athlete in high school and I always enjoyed physical fitness. Exercise science is really useful. I’m able to help out a ton of my friends, the cadets come to me for health programming, and I’ve made a bunch of programs for them to help them prep for different PT tests and that sort of thing.
#afrotc #mtuhumans #exercisescience #tenacity
I’m a fourth-year biomedical engineering student. I chose Michigan Tech because I knew I wanted to be an engineer. I saw Tech had a really high rate of employment and that was really attractive. And the small classroom sizes. I’m an introvert, so it was more appealing to me. And Michigan Tech has just worked out awesome. I’m from a suburb in Detroit. Nine hours from here. I’m so glad I stayed. I’ve made really close friends and all my professors I’m super close with—because of small class size, I can form great relationships with them, and I just feel really welcome here.
I’m on a club volleyball team so that’s another group of girls I’m close with; I’ve been playing volleyball my whole life, I’m so glad I could continue playing while at Tech. I’m close with a lot of the brothers in the fraternity that sponsored me as a Winter Carnival Queen candidate. They asked me if I would want to represent them and I was excited and a little scared because, like I said, I’m an introvert, so putting myself out there and being on stage in front of everyone is really scary to me. But it is something I can be proud of that I did and got over. Also, it’s my last semester so I want to keep making memories before I leave campus. I think it’s really important to put yourself out there and see what you like and don’t like; while you have the time on campus, it’s really important to expose yourself to anything you can because now is the time to figure it out. I’ve been able to do that here.
One of the memories I’ll take with me when I leave campus is snowshoeing. Downstate we don’t ever get enough snow to snowshoe. There are so many beautiful trails here. And Mont Ripley. There’s no ski hill back home so it’s the only time I can go. I also love to go to the Copper Country Humane Society. It’s super small so I can play with all the cats and dogs. Where I’m from I could never do that. Everything is much more personal up here.
I thought I wanted to go into research after I graduated. I got involved in a professor’s biomedical engineering research and I found I didn’t like it. That experience helped me narrow what I am interested in: industry, actual devices instead of the work to develop the devices. I think Tech makes it a priority to give students diverse classes. I’ve had a class on cardiovascular engineering, ethics, and medical devices. I’ve been able to see what specific field I want to go into, what’s interesting to me. Cardiovascular engineering is definitely what I want to go into. But if I wouldn’t have taken that class, if it hadn’t been offered, I would have never known. It’s so awesome that the department and professors expose you to different areas.
To be nominated for the Hobey Baker Memorial Award is a huge honor. I saw teammates go through it; it was very cool to see them up there. But being in that category is something I never thought would happen for me. I don’t think too much into it, but it is crazy to see the support of the University, and it is such an amazing feeling.
Being on the hockey team, we are given a lot of resources to help us juggle hockey and school. Whenever we need a tutor or help with anything it is always there for us. Coming into college at 20 years old was very different because I wasn’t in school for three years. I had three tutors during my first semester to make sure I was succeeding in my classes. After my first semester, it got a lot easier for me because I was able to juggle school and hockey. During my first semester at Michigan Tech, I was undecided [on a major]. I talked with a lot of people and decided the best major for me would be sports and fitness management. I have zero regrets. I love my major; studying something that interests me makes school so much more enjoyable. I want to play hockey as long as I can after I graduate. If that does not work out, I plan to become a hockey coach. I am getting a minor in coaching.
There isn’t anything to dislike about Michigan Tech. The entire experience has been unbelievable. In my opinion, we have the best fans in the country. The John MacInnes Student Ice Arena is honestly the best experience in all of college hockey. The one class that really took me by surprise was Exercise Assessment. I talked with people who took the class before and they mentioned how it was one of the harder classes in this major. My GPA is right above a 3.0, so my mindset going into the class was to work as hard as I could and hopefully get a B. I ended up getting an A and didn’t get below a 92 percent on any of the exams. The class was so interesting and I think I got an A because I enjoyed it so much.
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