Kim Harrison
	2012
	Mechanical Engineering
	The Boeing Company
	Mechanical Design Engineer

What do you do in your current position? I work in Houston, Texas as a member of the Space Exploration Design team for The Boeing Company. Boeing is one of the key players in NASA's Commercial Crew Development Program, which is fostering competition between three contractors to design and build a space vehicle which can provide access to low earth orbit (including the International Space Station). As a design engineer, I'm working with a CAD program (Unigraphics) to help finalize the design concepts as we move forward to the production phase. It's a pretty sweet job and I work with the most passionate space nerds one will ever meet!

How has your PSU engineering education/experiences helped to get you where you are today? Penn State is awesome. It really helps to prepare you for the real world, especially if you work in a big company. If you can navigate your way through school and make a name for yourself as 1/40K students, the same applies to the corporate world. The breadth of collegiate organizations and career development opportunities is incredible and closely mimics life at a large company. Plus, being able to talk football has helped me make many friends in a new city.

How has your experience as an EA impacted your professional life so far? Being one of the founding members of EA, I saw how important it was to seek out any and all opportunities that would help build the organization. I think that same advice applies to building one's career. As such, I have been seeking out ways to improve not only my technical abilities, but my soft skills as well. Currently, I'm leading an improvement project to create a better on-boarding process by crafting a new hire handbook for the site. It has actually helped me to obtain a position of leadership as the Regional Deputy Chairperson and Communications Lead (obviously) in the new hire organization after only a month with the company.