Learn Something

This morning I had an email from the engineering college that Honeywell has awarded me a scholarship! It will more than pay for textbooks (a surprisingly large expense) and supplies for this year. Thanks, Honeywell!

Here’s the essay I wrote for the scholarship application.

I am a freshman in the Aeronautical Engineering program at NMSU.

Enrolling in college was a scary decision. Twenty years ago I failed to graduate from college, and for twenty years I told myself that I hated school. I have been out of work since July 2005 and money is a concern.

I couldn’t seem to muster the energy to find another computer job. When I began having nightmares about going back to work putting together more computer networks, I realized that I needed to do something different. With the support of my wife Anna I sat down to figure out what it was.

It turned out that I want to build rocket ships. I’ve been fascinated with space travel since before I can remember. In September 1991 I traveled to Las Cruces to watch the DC-X fly from White Sands, and as I stepped into the return bus I heard a voice in my head say, “You’re doing the wrong thing”. I shook it off and went back home to Oregon.

Thinking back to that incident today, I realize that not only was the voice telling me that I was in the wrong job, but that I should never have turned my back on that little rocket ship and the gleaming desert it flew above.

But at the end of 2005 all I knew was that I needed to live somewhere with a space industry. We did some research and visited a few places and Las Cruces felt like home, so we moved here and I began looking for work while we waited for the spaceport to come on line. The decision to join the space industry stopped the nightmares about computer work.

Then I discovered NMSU’s new Aeronautical Engineering program on the nmsu.edu website. The voice spoke up again and said “I want to do THAT!” It was my voice, of course. And it was right - I do want to be an aeronautical engineer. Two weeks later I walked back in to the classroom. It was scary, but it was the right thing to do. Now I’m ready for school. I want what it offers.

And I can do this. I have a natural aptitude with machines and grew up building all sorts of devices. I still have all of my Lego. I worked in technical support for many years and gain great satisfaction from solving problems for users. I have a keen appreciation for good user interfaces and elegant design and will work on a design until it feels “right” and there’s nothing left to remove.

My friends and family have always told me I’d be a good engineer. I look forward to learning the skills to enable me to contribute to building a spacefaring civilization.

My resume and other information is available on my web site at http://www.gdunge.com. You can reach me via email at dougw@spamcop.net.

Thanks for reading, and thank you for this opportunity.

I was pleased with it. I guess Honeywell liked it too.