Describe your potential job duties
- Deliver great customer service, while ensuring the safe and timely completion of flight operations.
- Assist with and ensure proper handling of aircraft, passengers, baggage, and cargo
- Communicate with cabin and ground personnel, air traffic control, and flight operations regarding the safe and efficient operation of flights.
In what ways did the Polytechnic and/or Purdue help make you uniquely qualified for your new job?
Coming to Purdue, I had high expectations of the Professional Flight program. During my time here, Purdue was still able to overperform in preparing me to pursue a career in aviation. Any flight school can teach a student how to fly, but the soft skills learned through the various courses offered within this degree has set me up to excel further than any other track I may have chosen to reach the airlines. The faculty have had long and prosperous careers in this field, and choose to teach at Purdue not for their own benefit but for the benefit of students. They bring their decades of industry experience to the classrooms so that students are well versed on the current climate of the industry, and give them the skills necessary to already be thinking about how to better the industry when they leave West Lafayette. Purdue does not train “normal” pilots, it trains the professional aviators that shape the future of our industry.
What specific classes helped prepare you for your new job?
From my most basic Introduction to Aviation Technology course through my degree capstone course, each class I took as part of my degree had a clear reason it was required. Whether it developed my technical flying skills, or soft skills such as reading comprehension and public speaking, each course could be traced to a specific aspect of my duties as a future first officer and captain at an airline. Purdue's Transport Aircraft Simulation Laboratory sticks out to me as the most beneficial, and is a course that I have utilized as a teaching assistant to best prepare my students and I for our futures as professional pilots. In our state-of-the-art Airbus A320NEO simulator, students learn about the operation of large “transport category aircraft,” or airliners. As this is the end goal for many students, it is our first glimpse into how airlines operate and what our job will entail in a few short years. As a TA I was able to combine my passion for teaching as well as my interest in this specific aircraft to gain knowledge that many other young aviators do not get outside of Purdue, which has helped me achieve the opportunity of flying this aircraft upon graduation that I would not have thought possible before entering college.