Jaylon Uzodinma knew he wanted to design aircraft since he was eight years old. A kid “infatuated with speed,” he read a book in his third-grade class called How Things Work with a diagram of the inside of an airplane. That was the “first moment” he saw the career path lying ahead of him.
Today, he’s a first-year doctoral student in aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
It wasn’t his only option. He also had fully-funded offers from the University of Michigan, Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I wanted to get started in establishing myself as a leader in the field of aerospace,” he says.
Now he’s busy juggling three different projects: one focused on the conceptual design of an advanced aircraft, another on how to curb carbon emissions from commercial aviation and a third on the computer models used in the aircraft design process.
It’s “high stress” but he likes that each project has a “different flavor,” he says. “You have to learn to think in different ways, from different perspectives of aerospace.”
There aren’t many African Americans in the aerospace industry, only 4%, according to 2018 Census Bureau data.
