Renee Fieldhouse - Office of Professional Practice - Purdue University

Fieldhouse is a senior project engineer for Taylor, a division of Carrier Commercial Refrigeration, Inc., in Rockton, Illinois. She credits the Co-op Program for being a major reason behind her decision to attend Purdue. After graduating from Purdue, she started her career in 1984 with Hughes Aircraft Company (Los Angeles) while pursuing a master’s degree in engineering from UCLA. She spent eight years at Hughes on many different assignments, culminating with a Los Angeles Area YWCA Leadership Award and an assignment at the GM “Factory of the Future” in Saginaw, Michigan.

Fieldhouse then migrated around the world and U.S. before returing to northern Illinois with Woodward in 2005. She reconnected with Purdue as a Woodward representative at job fairs. She worked as a production engineer on a fuel control project that keeps the U.S. Blackhawk and Apache helicopter fleets in the air. 

In the late 1990s, she initiated “The Fieldhouse Award” to annually acknowledge the hard work of a mechanical engineering major who is also involved in Society of Women Engineers and is preferably a co-op student. Fieldhouse typically presents the award personally each February at the SWE awards banquet.