If you had to tell someone how you got into your career field in fewer than 10 words, could you do it? Dr. Onome Scott-Emuakpor can.
"I played basketball and math was easy for me," he says. Then he repeated the same words one more time as if to reiterate that yep, that was it. That was the whole origin story.
Dr. Scott-Emuakpor is 6'7" and played forward for Wright State University in the late 1990s until an injury ended his basketball career. He declared mechanical engineering as a major, graduated, got a masters and a Ph.D. in the same subject from Ohio State University, led the experimental side of turbine engine structural integrity research at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) for nearly 13 years, and today he’s running his own aerospace and defense business, Hyphen Innovations. He's a taller-than-average guy who played college basketball, works on jet engines, and has had careersuccess that could conservatively be described as a rocket ride. The puns practically write themselves.
But as those nine words in quotes above suggest, Dr. Scott-Emuakpor's story isn't one of a young kid who grew up knowing they were going to be an engineer. "A lot of the students I mentor that are interns, they've known they wanted to be an engineer since they were in eighth grade," he says. "I didn't even know what an engineer did until I was 18."