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I decided to do the aerospace certificate at UK because mechanical engineering is really broad and I wanted to focus it down on something a little bit more specific that I was really, really interested in. And aerospace is really at the cutting edge of humanity-- it's a really exciting area of development. And UK has a lot of really good faculty for it so I knew that I would be able to have an opportunity to get a really quality education with it.

So here at UK there are several opportunities for aerospace students, there's involvement in the UAV lab-- which always has research going on. There's involvement in AIAA-- they have their own projects going on and they bring in industry professionals from the airspace field. Many of the professors here have an aerospace background so they're looking at computational fluid dynamics for aircraft, they're looking at thermodynamics and re-entry shields.

This past summer we went out to Oklahoma to do a flight campaign with a bunch of other universities that we're paired up with. So we got to show our stuff against theirs and kind of collected all this data together. So it's this big team environment where we're learning from them, they're learning from us, and we're all learning from the environment and from our groups.

Some of the awesome aerospace activities I've done here at UK have been launching the weather balloon to capture the eclipse from the edge of space. Being a part of the UAV lab to help outfit UAVs for early weather prediction systems. Also, we've designed a racing UAV from the ground up for my senior design project.

What I find most enjoyable about it is, it's hard not to just have fun with it. Everything that you do is just so exciting, like just getting something that was on the ground up into the air. And just overcoming all of the unique challenges that come up along the way, because there's always something you didn't think about that you're going to have to think about at the last minute and fix it.