Students of the Future: Seniors set sites on engineering

In this fourth installment in a series of articles showing the extraordinary students, two seniors share their plans for engineering. 

Senior Vincent Sacco has always enjoyed math and science, especially physics. When he reached high school and started taking engineering classes, he realized how much he enjoyed it. Working as a team and building fun projects made him see that engineering was the right thing for him.

Sacco plans to go to Iowa State and obtain his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and later hopes to earn a master’s degree. Mechanical engineering focuses on the mechanical, design and building of machines for their specific uses. To prepare for his future he is currently taking a multitude of different classes such as AP Calculus, Principles of Engineering, Mechanics and more. 

“Both of my parents are engineers,” Sacco said, “They have been helping me try to apply for different scholarships because they are in different organizations for engineers, so they are helping me, at least on the financial side, to apply for scholarships.” 

Although he is thinking of becoming a mechanical engineer as he is the most familiar with it, he said he is willing to go into other fields, software engineering being one of them. However, he said he has begun to turn away from it as a career choice as AI advances further making it easier and easier to code. 

“With AI and how much they are able to do with the coding side of things, I’m not sure how available jobs will be in the future with how rapidly AI is advancing,” Sacco said. 

For people who are worried about taking the leap, Sacco said that, “When you are older you’re not going to go to sleep and wish, ‘I’m glad I didn’t do that.’ You’re going to think about the stuff you didn’t do and wish you did, so if you want to do something—whether it’s sports, music, literally anything—do it.”

Like Sacco, senior Alex Demastes hopes to also go to school for mechanical engineering and is preparing for his future by taking engineering classes, obtaining scholarships and joining different clubs such as the rocket club. It wasn’t until recently that Demastes figured out he wanted to go into engineering; however, he still wants to help people and said this is the best way for him to reach his goal, stating that maybe later in his career to focus on sustainable energy. 

“There’s a lot of stuff you can do for underprivileged communities and stuff like that with engineering,” Demastes said.

Even though he is worried about his future, he said, “You shouldn’t let it discourage you.” 

Ten years from now he hopes that he will have a job in the field, but other than that he said he isn’t really sure where his future will take him.