Young Professionals Advisory Council meets with faculty and students to share early career experiences
Four recent graduates returned to campus for an important visit – and to represent the potential that students have after graduation. Those four alumni took time off from their jobs at NASA, Argonne, Rolls-Royce, and Blue Origin to serve as the Young Professionals Advisory Council for Purdue AAE.
Their visits included a group conversation with undergraduate advisors, meetings with several faculty members, and time with Bill Crossley, the J. William Uhrig and Anastasia Vournas Head of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
“Having conversations with Professor Crossley now is very different than when I was a student,” says Andrew Vuong (BSAAE ’20, MSAAE ’22), a test engineer on Blue Origin’s BE3PM engine. “It’s been really cool learning about how the school is run.”
But the major draw for participating in the YPAC wasn’t just getting to know the inner workings of academia – it was the opportunity to talk directly with students. Allissa Battocletti Noffke (BSAAE '11), who works at NASA Johnson Space Center handling spacewalk operations on the International Space Station, remembered how impactful that experience was for her as an undergrad.
“When I was a student, it was so valuable to interact with recent grads,” Allissa said. “I very much want to shoot straight and be real with them, and the opportunity to come back and do that for current students is very rewarding.”
The two other members of the group are: Matthew Tracy (BSAAE ’21), a performance engineer doing systems-level analyses of engine cycles for Rolls-Royce; and Suman Chakraborty (PhDAAE ’22), who is studying liquid fuels and propulsion as a postdoc research associate at Argonne National Laboratory.
Watch for future features on YPAC members later this academic year.