Your Philanthropy Launches EWU Engineering Students’ Careers

Are you an annual or EWU employee payroll donor? If you answered yes, then a portion of your unrestricted giving supports the EWU Foundation’s Start Something Big Grant Program that helps professors innovate and engage students in the real-world application of classroom learning and undergraduate research. Your dollars help fund career-building experiences outside the classroom that propel Eastern graduates into good jobs after graduation.

EWU students stand inside an autoclave at partner AGC Aerocomposites. AGC is helping the EWU IREC team build the competition rocket airframe at their Hayden, Idaho facility. Partnerships leverage budgets and earn extra competition points for the team. With seed money from Weiser’s $2,000 Start Something Big Grant, students developed a $19,600 budget, sealed partnership deals and raised financial and in-kind support.

In 2015, a Start Something Big Grant is helping Martin Weiser, PhD, and 20 students capitalize on four years of undergraduate research to compete at the June Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) near Green River, Utah. Student projects have encompassed the development and testing of solid rocket propellants, parachute opening dynamics, and flexural properties of composite structures.

Weiser advises the EWU Rocket Club to give students the opportunity to apply their undergraduate research and practice their knowledge and skills on complex interdisciplinary team projects. Why? Weiser says, “This experience will help them stand out from other entry-level engineers and directly benefit the companies they join by reducing the time required for training.”

Student Spencer Scott says that “Marty is like a kid in a candy shop,” when it comes to working with rockets and the complicated engineering that makes for successful launches. Weiser laughs in agreement but holds up both hands to emphasize, “A solid IREC team program is a student and industry recruiting tool for EWU’s College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics because it builds close ties with the more than 60 Spokane area companies that provide goods and services to the global aerospace industry. And, it demonstrates that EWU’s computing and engineering sciences students are qualified to compete against those enrolled in some of the world’s most “elite engineering schools.”

Your gifts to EWU Foundation work every day to fuel this kind of student success. Thank you!