The way Victoria Pellerito Gonzalez sees it, you don’t come to Lawrence Technological University for the big name. You come to LTU to make a name for yourself.
That’s certainly the case for Gonzalez, who is now working toward her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at the University of California-Irvine while working for NASA.
In a talk to LTU students, faculty, staff, and guests during National Engineers Week in February, Gonzalez said as a young girl she was never told she was smart and recalled crying over a seventh-grade math test.
Gonzalez graduated as an average student from Macomb Dakota High School in 2015 and said she chose LTU because the university offered her a volleyball scholarship.
Shortly after arriving on the Southfield campus, Gonzalez remembers an early assignment from a freshman engineering class taught by Andrew Gerhart, professor of mechanical engineering. “He had us write a paper on what we wanted to do with an engineering degree,” Gonzalez recalled. “That was the first time I had a chance to sit down and really think about what I wanted to be as an engineer.”
She came up with three major goals: she wanted her work to contribute to society and the world around her; she wanted her work to have a positive impact on society; and she wanted her work to help advance knowledge of the Earth, its place in the universe, and Earth’s unique ability to support life—the only place in that unimaginably vast universe where we know life is supported.
“So, I figured I wanted to work at NASA,” she said. But a problem: how would she get to NASA from a school like Lawrence Tech, which doesn’t have a big name in space science?
That’s when she realized the opportunities that LTU offers. It’s not just those much-advertised small class sizes and personal relationships with professors. It’s all the opportunities, she said, that LTU gives its students to both “learn and lead.” While at LTU, Gonzalez was president of the LTU chapters of both Pi Tau Sigma, the mechanical engineering honor society, and Tau Beta Pi, the overall engineering honor society. She worked as a student tutor and class aide. She got numerous opportunities to conduct meaningful research as an undergraduate. She was a leader on LTU’s SAE Aero Design competition aircraft team. And she got a federally funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates summer at New Mexico Tech, where she published peer-reviewed research and presented it at scientific conferences.
Her bumpy road to graduate school was smoothed by honors like being named one of the nation’s top 20 aerospace engineering students by Aviation Week magazine and by earning a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship award. Her initially bumpy entrance to graduate school life at UC-Irvine got better when she switched faculty sponsors and started doing work she really loved, in urban air mobility—yes, the science behind the safety and standards of tomorrow’s air taxis.
Through the networks she created by her scholarship, she was hired as a civil servant by NASA three years ago, where she now works while finishing her graduate studies and research.
“We’re getting closer to the reality of air taxis,” she said. “My research involves how a network of air taxis would work within an urban environment, how to safely and efficiently integrate into the airspace, and what regulatory standards are necessary for this next generation of aircraft.”
In her talk at LTU, she said she has four lessons for students:
- Don’t let anyone else determine what you are capable of.
- You can do absolutely anything with hard work and the willingness to learn.
- Fear is your greatest compass—head toward your fears, not away from them.
- Follow your heart and trust yourself.
As for her own scholarly and career path, she quoted Steve Jobs: “The dots only connect if you look at them in reverse.”
For a video of Gonzalez’ talk at LTU, click here.
To hear more about Gonzalez’s story from two years ago for LTU’s Giving Day—when Gonzalez was set to go to Virgin Galactic, but NASA swooped in after the interview and hired her—click here.
By: Matt Roush
