Never Just Metal

My engineering education didn’t start in the classroom; it started at a press brake. Ten hours a day on a machine shop floor, bending components for the aerospace and automotive industries. Out there, a single deviation from tolerance isn’t a rounding error. It’s the line between a part that holds and one that fails. I learned fast that an engineered component is never just metal. It’s the hardware that someone is trusting to get them back home to their family. That responsibility reframed everything for me. I stopped asking how a part gets made and started asking why it is designed the way it is.

That question is what carried me into Aerospace Engineering at Kent State, and into the work I do now across mechanical design, rocketry, and applied research. Through internships in aerospace and industrial manufacturing, I've designed tooling, developed production improvements, authored engineering documentation, and worked directly with hardware from concept through implementation.