Year-in-Review 2025-2026

If last year was about finding my direction, this year was about learning what it actually takes to get there.

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The experience that defined this past year was landing my co-op at Delta Air Lines — not the job itself, but everything that happened before it. I had been applying to Delta for over a year. Every application came back as a rejection, and for a while I couldn't figure out why. My resume had been reviewed by multiple advisors and by most measures was competitive. But the rejections kept coming, and at my lowest point I was submitting 20 to 30 co-op applications a day just trying to force something to work. That approach didn't fail because of effort — it failed because volume is not a strategy.

The shift happened when I stopped trying to apply to everything and started trying to understand one company deeply. I began reaching out to Delta employees on LinkedIn, though most messages went unanswered. My advisor connected me directly with current Delta co-ops, and those conversations gave me a clearer picture of the program and the culture than any job posting ever had. From there, I used CareerShift to track down employee emails and spent hours narrowing a list of engineers and managers I genuinely wanted to work with. I was thorough to the point of hitting LinkedIn's search limits. Eventually I had a shortlist of about 50 to 60 people. I emailed the engineers first — asked questions, got resume feedback, learned what the engineering teams actually needed. Then I cold emailed the managers: short, direct, no filler. Resume attached, clear interest stated. That is how I got the role.

That process taught me something that no class has: persistence without direction is just noise. The pivot from quantity to quality — from casting wide to aiming carefully — is a lesson I'll carry into every professional situation I face.

 

The work itself was equally formative. Ground Support Equipment Engineering covers everything at an airport that moves but isn't an airplane — tugs, loaders, jetbridges, ground vehicles, maintenance equipment. My role involved evaluating maintenance requests, supporting internal and external projects with cost-benefit analyses, testing battery systems, and writing Engineering Authorizations for equipment installations. In the first two months alone, I was traveling nearly every week to different airports to meet with vendors, assess project sites, and conduct initial installs. That kind of fieldwork — walking a ramp, sitting across from a mechanic who's been doing this for 20 years, figuring out what the actual problem is versus what the report says — taught me that engineering is as much about communication and judgment as it is about technical knowledge.

Coming into this year as a junior, I now have a clearer picture of where I want to go. My long-term path is in technical engineering roles — likely moving from aviation into automation or hardware systems over time — and eventually into leadership and management. What this year reinforced is that getting there isn't just about being technically capable. It's about being someone people want to work with, someone who does the unglamorous work of building relationships and understanding context before walking into a room with solutions.

The Delta co-op didn't just add a line to my resume. It changed how I approach problems, how I think about persistence, and what it means to earn something.