In the News: NHS grad earns engineering prize

What’s engineering all about and what do engineers do for a living? That’s the question Alexandria Moseley, an engineering student at Oregon State University, tried to answer the afternoon of Dec. 16 for students in Trish Beckius’ physics class at Newberg High School.

Moseley, 22, told them that a few years from now it’s unlikely they’ll remember what a quadratic equation is, or how to solve it. On the other hand the problem solving skills they’ll learn during the school’s annual egg-drop or King of the Hill competitions (students have to design a contraption to protect an egg as it is dropped from a series of heights for the first one and a vehicle capable of climbing a small wooden ramp for the second) they will carry with them. Solving problems, those are engineering skills, she said.

The Newberg native was recently recognized as one of 15 of the most promising engineering students in the United States and abroad for this very work of inspiring high school students to go into engineering. She’s visited more than 100 classrooms across Oregon to bring her message of what engineering is.

Friday’s session in Beckius’ class was maybe a little bit more meaningful as Moseley sat in the same chairs the students a few years ago.
Mosely is in the fourth year of a five-year engineering program at Oregon State University and was recognized by National Engineers Week earlier this month. Moseley is majoring in industrial and manufacturing engineering.

“A lot of kids don’t do engineering because they can’t picture what engineers do,” she said. Not her though.

“Originally, in high school, I wanted to be a bio engineer,” she said. The profession appealed to her because she could clearly see how this could help people. Then she changed her mind when “I realized that I didn’t want to be in the lab all day long.”

An internship at A-dec Inc. the summer she graduated from high school put her in contact with manufacturing engineers and “that’s what really made me want to pursue this major.”

As a high school senior she applied to and was accepted in the Multiple Engineering Cooperative Program at OSU, which pairs students with paid internships from March to September their last two years of school. Through MECOP Moseley completed a second internship at A-dec earlier this year and will be working at Welch Allyn in Beaverton next year.

Her outreach work has already born fruit as she’s seen students she had talked to enroll as freshmen at OSU.

By: Laurent Bonczijk, Newberg Graphic