With about 20 student-led organizations, NIU’s College of Engineering and Engineering Technology (CEET) is strengthened by our engineering Huskies who seize the expanded opportunities that those groups provide.
But there’s another group that sometimes stays below the radar: our extraordinary student-athletes across a variety of sports who juggle the academic rigors of engineering with the demands of Division I competition.
On Monday evening, we welcomed 13 of them from across 10 athletic programs to a dinner hosted by Dean Dave Grewell.
In addition to sharing about their own journeys–seven hail from outside the United States, for example–they heard from one of the dean’s former students, Joe Vanstrom, through a video call.
With the youngest of his three children in his lap–as an engineer, Vanstrom is adept at multi-tasking–he shared time-management and other insights about his own academic, athletic and career paths. He offered tips from his time as a Division I college football player, as well as his experiences as a college instructor, then a college lecturer and now operations engineer at Andersen Corporation.
Hannah Bolly, an industrial and systems engineering major and pitcher on the softball team, said Vanstrom’s remarks “helped me to reflect on my own personal experiences as an engineering student.”
“It made me realize that, in the grand scheme of things, your education is the most important thing,” she said, “and the ability to do all of that while playing the sport you love is truly a privilege.”
She was also encouraged to “realize how we are all in the same boat: balancing classes, our sport and our outside lives.”
Pratyaksh LNU, an industrial and systems engineering major on the men’s tennis team, was struck by “the common experiences” that he shares with his engineering student-athlete peers.
“It was reinforcing to hear that a lot of us go through similar experiences and challenges in our lives and careers and share a similar thought process,” he said. “I feel supported in knowing that our efforts are being recognized and that we have a strong structure backing us up in our endeavors ahead.”
Genevieve “Gigi” Wilson, a women’s soccer player majoring in mechanical engineering, said she appreciated the gathering, especially because “it can still be very isolating being an engineering student, given our schedules don’t overlap a lot with classmates and other teammates…having a space where we are being acknowledged and can interact with each other was great.”
Grewell organized the dinner, held in the dean’s suite of the Engineering Building, because, he said, “I wanted to prioritize time with these student-athletes because too often their efforts go unnoticed outside of the field of play.”
Twelve of the students who gathered Monday are undergraduates; one is a graduate student. Five are majoring in mechanical engineering, two industrial and systems engineering, two electrical engineering, two engineering management, one biomedical engineering and one engineering technology.
They represented a diverse cross-section of athletic programs: baseball, softball, gymnastics, track and field, cross country, women’s tennis, men’s tennis, women’s soccer, men’s soccer and wrestling.
“I’m proud of all they accomplish every day,” Grewell said. “Excelling in engineering while competing at a high level in athletics requires commitment, perseverance and outstanding time management. They are developing the leadership, teamwork and problem-solving skills that will enable them to make a meaningful impact on their communities, their industries and the world.”
