This month I had an energizing and enlightening visit to see some students at the University of Nevada in Reno. They are all passionate about aerospace and aviation. But none of them are aerospace engineering majors. Because UNR doesn’t have an aerospace engineering department! Or an aerospace engineering major.

However, through a student-led club called The UNR Aerospace Club, and a highly coupled UNV-Reno AIAA Student Chapter, these students are doing amazing, impactful things.

And they are applying their creativity, resourcefulness, and diligence to forge a career path into the aerospace field that should be an example for college students everywhere.

Passion for aerospace and aviation-focused projects

Here are projects that these students are working on:

• drones
• model rockets and rocketry (advancing into serious levels)
• 3-D printing

I think I neglected several others. The particular reason for my visit was to hear a presentation about their work with 3-D printing of metallic parts. They were applying statistical analyses to help optimize the design and production of these parts.

Projects targeting specific employers and careers

Here’s where these nontraditional collections of students have hit a winning innovative formula. A student joins their Aero Club or AIAA Student Chapter and says, “I want to get a job at ____ company.”

Then the other students help learn and strategize to ask, what is a project you can do here that would (1) help you learn the knowledge and skills that are in demand for a job at this company, and (2) persuade this company that you are exactly the kind of person they want to hire?

Then the student (or students) get busy developing a project to meet those goals.

One of those students had to leave our meeting early because he had to work on his own project to fulfill this mission – flying a model aircraft with an autonomous control system to deliver a test payload.

Turning disadvantages into advantages with a lack of aero engineering majors

Maybe it’s a surprise, or maybe it’s not. These student teams derived big benefits from having students with majors that were NOT aerospace engineering. They were majors in physics, applied math, computer science, mechanical engineering, and I believe I heard about a nuclear engineering major too.

They also had a student who was a business major. There can be roles and opportunities for non-STEM majors too.

When you form a student club or AIAA Student Chapter, as long as you attract a critical mass of students with a passion to work on some projects together, the students at University of Nevada – Reno have shown that you don’t need an Aerospace Engineering department to be successful.

In fact, the students said themselves that the fact that they had such a variety of majors and interests made their teams – and their projects – much more interesting and rewarding.

Rethink your criteria for choosing a college or university

This experience gave me greater appreciation for what can happen at a college or university without a dedicated aerospace engineering program. These students are doing career-launching aerospace and aviation projects on a shoe-string budget. Without a dedicated department to support them. And without a degree to match, necessarily.

What they have utilized and leveraged, however, is the support that comes from forming an official student club (which provides some budget and campus space) and becoming an AIAA Student Chapter (which gets them connected with the larger aerospace and aviation community, including experienced professionals like myself).

So be sure to check out all of the colleges and universities near you, even if they don’t have an aerospace engineering degree program. If they have an active student club or chapter with an aerospace focus, you can still have an effective way to launch your career in this direction.

For anyone who lives in Nevada and is reading this article, I hope you found a school to investigate! Here’s a photo of us after the student presentation. We had at least twice this number of students there for most of the meeting, but many of them had to leave for their other projects by the time we took this photo.

Thanks also goes to Jane Hansen, the Regional Director of AIAA, and Professor Zhaodan Kong of University of California, Davis. They also made the trip to Reno to meet the students and be an audience for their presentation.