Katelyn Leary

Flying and operating various aircraft, conducting missions like attack, defense, reconnaissance, and search and rescue, while also providing vital support to the US Naval fleet. 

 

Purdue's NROTC program uniquely helped me be qualified for my future career as a Naval Officer. I was able to grow in multiple leadership roles such as planning an entire semester of our lab periods by working directly with staff and reaching out to Purdue faculty leaders. 

 

All of the AET professors have been extremely helpful in motivating and supporting me towards my goals. Two specific professors would be Professor Don Barnes who runs the avionics labs and Professor Corben Meyer who runs the reciprocating engines lab and sheetmetal fabrication labs. Both of these professors care deeply about their students' well being and both have pushed me to be a better student and ask questions to learn. They both have supported my career choices of going into the Navy and inspired me to pursue testing for my Airframe and Powerplant certification through the FAA. 

 

All of the Naval Science courses have been helping me to prepare to become a Naval Officer upon commissioning in May. My favorite course has been this semester's Leadership and Ethics course (NS413) taught by our Commanding Officer, Captain Lee. We dive into numerous case studies within the naval fleet and learn about mistakes that have happened in the past to help us begin our journey on how to become a successful well rounded officer. We also run mock NJP (non judicial punishment) boards and role-play how we would handle certain situations. Lastly, we learned what our strong suits and areas of improvement are in leadership and how we would be able to act upon certain situations in the naval fleet. 

 

My favorite project was my senior design capstone project for AT497000 under instruction of Dr. Tim Ropp. Our project was over RLV (Reusable Launch Vehicle) Launch Readiness and an Introduction to Commercial Space Operations course to the Industry Advisory Board within Purdue’s School of Aviation and Transportation Technology (SATT). Alongside my two peers, Daniel and Faisal, we developed an introductory module to be integrated into an existing AET lab next semester. To ensure relevance and student interest, we conducted an IRB-approved survey targeting all undergraduates in SATT. The feedback we received helped shape our project which bridges current academic offerings with the growing demands of commercial space operations. I am proud of the work we’ve accomplished over the past year in this course, and I’m excited to see how future students will expand on it to help grow and evolve our program even further!