Sometimes, life come full circle. As a high school student at Schalmont High School in Rotterdam, New York, Rachel Stagnitti looked forward to the days when the RPI Engineering Ambassadors would visit. Today, Stagnitti is a senior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and now she is one of the ambassadors making those visits to local schools. You can hear Stagnitti talk about her experience here.

RPI Engineering
Ambassadors is an educational outreach program aimed at inspiring middle and
high school students to get excited about careers in engineering. Rensselaer
engineering students develop and deliver presentations in area schools, and on
campus, that highlight the role engineering plays in solving the world’s
greatest challenges.

In celebration of
National Engineers Week, she shared how her multiple experiences with this
program have helped her in her journey to becoming an engineer.

“These kids would
come in, and they'd only be two or three years older than me. They would stand
in front of a group, and they were just so confident, and it seemed like they
knew so much,” Stagnitti said. “I'd sit there in the classroom and say, ‘Wow, I
want to be like them someday.’”

Stagnitti was already
interested in pursuing an education and career in engineering when the
Rensselaer students visited her class at Schalmont. But the Ambassadors amplified
her ambition.

“You can talk about
an education in engineering or an education at RPI, but unless you see people
actually doing it, people actually going through it, it's not that concrete,”
Stagnitti said. “It kind of gave me more of an insight to what it would really
be like and something I could maybe participate in while I was there.”

Stagnitti enrolled
at Rensselaer, and soon found herself standing in front of a group of high
school students.

“One of my favorite
things about it is seeing the transformation,” Stagnitti said. “You get kids
who really don’t think they're interested in jet engines, or they're not
interested in wind energy, and they sit through your presentation and they do
their hands-on application at the end, and you can see their faces light up.”

The program has
taught Stagnitti important presentation and communication skills that she will
carry with her after graduation. It has also allowed her to pay forward the
instruction she received. In doing so, she has sparked curiosity in students
across the region.

A few months ago,
Stagnitti was even able to welcome students and teachers from Schalmont to the
Rensselaer campus and encourage students like her younger self to follow a
similar path.

“It’s personal; it's
close to home for me, it's something that I can directly impact my community
with,” Stagnitti said. “I would hope that I was able to impart on them the same
thing that the Engineering Ambassadors were able to impart on me four years ago—that
I’ve been able to show them that engineering is something that everybody can do
if you put your mind to it. It's something that's attainable and it's
everywhere around us, and that just being able to think critically and think
about the things that are going on is really important in our world.”