For nearly 25 years, PLTW has offered transformative classroom and learning experiences for PreK-12 students. Now, many of those students are professionals in STEM fields. We recently reached out to several PLTW alumni to learn more about their educational and career journeys and find out what advice they have for current PLTW students. If you are a PLTW alumnus interested in sharing your story, we’d love to hear from you here.
Rob Scott lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and works as an Manufacturing Engineer for Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. He participated in PLTW Gateway in middle school and in high school he completed Introduction to Engineering Design, Principles of Engineering, and Aerospace Engineering courses in the PLTW Engineering program.
In what grades did you participate in PLTW? What were some of your most memorable experiences from PLTW?
I participated in PLTW from 8th-12th grade. My most memorable experience, by far, was being bussed to Lockheed Martin to interview for the internship my junior year of high school. The most memorable thing we did in the classroom was, in Aerospace Engineering, we constructed our own airfoils from scratch and conducted experiments on them in a wind tunnel. Another one of my favorite experiments was doing a real tensile test on a piece of metal.
What did you journey look like to get to where you are today?
I interned at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Fort Worth, Texas, each summer until I graduated college. I was attending the Colorado School of Mines for mechanical engineering at the time. Once I graduated, I started working full-time at Lockheed Martin in manufacturing engineering.
What is your current role within your company? What are your responsibilities in this position?
I am a Manufacturing Engineer working with a team on a product-lifecycle-management software. My responsibilities in this role include designing digital manufacturing systems that will save vast amounts of resources as we move forward into a digital age.
What did you learn in PLTW that still helps today?
Learning CAD software in PLTW has helped not only in college, but also tremendously in the industry. Being introduced to AutoCAD in PLTW Gateway courses was vital in helping me build the necessary foundational skills for my job today.
Do you have any advice for current PLTW students?
If you are enrolled in PLTW classes, you are doing yourself a huge service for a very important part of your life to come. If you are truly passionate about STEM, I encourage you to take the opportunities that PLTW gives you seriously. The more skills you build while you are still very young will pay off dividends in the future.