Ready for Takeoff
An aeronautics graduate student at a top school favors teaching over research, and he encourages others to do the same.
By Mark Matthews
From his résumé, you’d expect Zachary del Rosario to land a faculty job at a top research university, building on his score of refereed articles, conference proceedings, and talks. That’s if industry didn’t snap him up first. An aeronautical and astronautical engineering Ph.D. candidate at Stanford, he won a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship and a $116,000 campus award for promising faculty candidates. And he has an intriguing thesis topic: It applies computation, data, and modeling to assess risk in aircraft design with uncommon precision, ensuring safety while reducing weight and giving designers more flexibility.
But this budding academic, 28, isn’t shooting for a research career. He really wants to teach and says he most likely will join a liberal arts or undergraduate-focused college. “I want to find an institution where teaching is valued. A lot of institutions don’t fall in that category,” says del Rosario. He hopes to encourage others in research-intensive universities to pursue a similar path. “I want to create opportunities for R1 students to think about teaching,” he says. At such schools, “it’s harder to find people who are passionate about education.”
As Stanford’s ASEE student chapter president last year, he found that “a lot of people were interested in education, but there was not a community around education.” To remedy that, in April the chapter put on a series of interactive workshops—aimed mainly at teaching assistants—on the fundamentals of teaching. Developed around four concepts—active learning, learning goals, inclusion, and assessment—the workshops drew 70 attendees. Stanford faculty members and an outside expert explored such topics as a disconnect between what instructors decide to teach and how students learn; ways of fostering a sense of belonging; various models of group work; and the benefits and drawbacks of different assessment methods.
Del Rosario will soon reach out to peers across the country as cochair of ASEE’s Graduate Students Task Force, working alongside Kim LaScola Needy, graduate school dean at the University of Arkansas. Following up on a 2018 ASEE graduate student roundtable, the task force will recommend how ASEE can help this cohort succeed. It will draw on a National Academies study, “Graduate STEM Education for the 21st Century,” which recommended, in part, a “more student focused” system with “greater emphasis . . . on graduate students as individuals with diverse needs and challenges.”
Del Rosario thinks students should gain more influence over their education, something he found missing through middle and high school in Johnstown, Pa. “As a student, I was actively discouraged from learning by my teachers” in the sense of exploring and questioning, he recalls. Olin College, where he studied mechanical engineering, turned out to be “liberating . . . a really weird, really cool place” where, he says, “students have a big say in defining their own education.” With four teammates, he took on a senior project from Boeing: Come up with novel design concepts for the pylon that attaches the engine to the wing of an aircraft. The team created CAD models of the design and tested it with software. He left Olin with “a deep belief in the power of higher education” and a segue into graduate-level aeronautics.
Del Rosario, who learned how to fly at the same time he learned how to drive, interned at Northrop Grumman in 2017. While there, he interviewed company engineers to learn about their work. Not all were taken with his thesis, he allows: “The last thing you want is some kid saying the way you’re thinking about numbers is wrong.’ Indeed, his research departs from the way aircraft designers are accustomed to dealing with risk, he says: making uncertainty irrelevant with a comfortable safety margin. That approach protects the public, but it “doesn’t give us tools for improving design,” del Rosario says. He uses data, algorithms, and modeling software to derive a provably conservative but precise margin for error, offering evidence that his “precision margin” can reduce excess weight by 2 percent to 3 percent. Designers can then ask, “What can we take out and still build a safe aircraft?”
Hoping to complete his degree in the spring of 2020, del Rosario nevertheless is intent on finding out what’s on the minds of his fellow engineering grad students. He’s eager to hear from them.
Mark Matthews is editor of Prism.
© Zachary del Rosario/Francis Igot