Alumni

I am glad I chose Liberty because of the friends and faculty I was able to meet and build relationships with, that would last beyond graduation. – Liberty help me prepare for the workplace by improving my communication skills, helping me understand the engineering process, and by building my network with the other students and faculty there.  I would recommend Liberty for someone looking to get a Christian education and who wants to be a part of a young and growing engineering program. That will give them the opportunity to make a big impact in the future of the engineering school.

A personal story for me was in my senior year I finally got together with a few friends and through meeting and hanging out with each other multiple times a week, we decided to start our own business together after college. We were very excited due to the common interests that we found out about through talking about why each of us wanted to start our own business. Along with discussing where we thought the world of technology was going, and new potential industries that were going to be big in the next 10-20 years.

I am incredibly grateful that God directed my path to Liberty University. Liberty University has prepared me exceptionally well for my career as an engineer. The program provided incredible challenge and ultimately, reshaped the way I view problems and challenges both as an engineer and as a person. Liberty University as a whole and specifically the School of Engineering is filled with exceptional educators who have followed God’s calling to challenge and train. These educators aim to create the best engineers in the workforce and do so while maintaining a Christ-centered atmosphere. They provided some of my greatest challenges while praying for and encouraging me to succeed.

The community at Liberty and within the School of Engineering is second to none. LU Engineering aims to keep their class sizes small which provides a lot of peer to peer and instructor interaction. To me, this was invaluable to my learning process. My class banded together to learn, grow, and challenge one another. I will always remember, appreciate, and stay in touch with those in my class.

Upon graduation, I began working for a defense contractor as a Mechanical Engineer. I cannot stress how well prepared I have felt for my work in this role. Every engineering role has new and different problems than those you solved in school, but I believe the goal of the educators at Liberty’s School of Engineering is to stretch you to think differently and to mold the way you approach and view problems. Liberty’s program provided me with so many opportunities in and out of the classroom. These opportunities helped me grow in my personal, professional, and technical skills. The program is unique, and I am confident I would not have received the same level of stellar training and certainly not Christ-centered training anywhere else. I proudly hang my Liberty University banner in my workplace and tell everyone I can about the program. I would highly, highly recommend Liberty University!

It was all a bit of a whirlwind, but right after graduation, I started working for The MITRE Corporation as a Systems Engineering Fellow. This fellowship is a federally funded program which partners with a host organization. Since I commissioned into the Air Force, they were able to authorize this program as my first assignment. This fellowship has me working at MITRE during the week and going to UVA every other weekend to pursue a Masters Degree in Systems Engineering. It’s an incredible program and I am truly blessed to be a part of it.

Literally, everything that I learned in capstone has already been mentioned and I’m actually seeing those concepts utilized in the real world. Among the other fellows (one civilian Naval employee, one DHS employee, and a recent Math major grad), I have been the ONLY one to have previously heard and studied these core SE concepts. Additionally, the executives and other management people here at MITRE have been relatively shocked that I somewhat know and understand these concepts. It’s unusual to them that an undergrad engineering program includes all of this information.

So, thank you so much for pushing all of us to learn and apply Systems Engineering Analysis. It’s not only helpful, but I believe it is integral for any engineer; I’m finding it particularly useful as an SE.

Why you are glad you chose Liberty?
When I first came to Liberty I wanted to graduate as soon as possible, but when I graduated, I felt that I was leaving home again. Liberty helped me to grow spiritually since I was surrounded by Christians from all over the world. At Liberty, I made friends from different places. Liberty gave me one of the best educations. I learned the English language at Liberty, then started pursuing engineering. At Liberty I was never bored; there were different sports that I was able to play.

How did Liberty prepare you for the Marketplace? As an engineering student, I had group projects, which taught me to work in a team and to become a problem solver.

Why you would recommend Liberty to others?

I would recommend Liberty because it is a very healthy, Christian, and safe environment. It took me six years to graduate, and during those six years, I never felt threatened or scared of anything.  Also, the education at Liberty is very strong and most importantly the faculty are always there to help their students.  Lastly, I would recommend Liberty because of the facilities and many activities available to participate in.

Could you share a personal story from your time at Liberty?

I came to the U.S in 2013 without speaking English; at Liberty, I learned English. What helped me the most was that the people were very friendly and welcoming. At Liberty, I was able to play soccer, the sport that I love.  I was also able to study the major that I wanted to learn and in the best environment.

If I were to go back in time, I would for sure attend Liberty again.

Why I’m glad I chose Liberty:

I’m glad I chose Liberty for many reasons but most importantly was that I was able to pursue my academics rigorously while not leaving my faith behind. Many of my friends who chose to attend secular institutions were taught that their faith held them back from pursuing excellence in academics, Liberty taught me that my faith can fuel my excellence in engineering. In addition, Liberty’s engineering faculty challenged me to aim higher and equipped me to do my very best. Now attending engineering school at The George Washington University, I often see contrast to the superior teaching I received at LU.

How Liberty prepared me for the marketplace:

Liberty’s Engineering Faculty challenged me in every class I took, they never allowed us to cut corners and made it their mission to never allow us to leave class without grasping a topic or offering office hours. They were true professionals in teaching as well as engineering and they always encourage us to never settle but to be champions for Christ in our pursuit of engineering.

Through connections made in the school of engineering, I was able to get an internship with Harris Corporation, right in Lynchburg. I was able to work part-time while pursuing my studies which allowed me to immediately apply what I was learning in class to my work. I felt well prepared for the work that was given to me and was able to take on additional responsibilities and impress the older engineers at Harris. I’m confident that it was my experiences both hands on in the lab, as well as in lectures that prepared me so well for my work at Harris.

In my last couple of years at LU, I performed research on the weekends with an engineering professor who was working on a patent. I was able to put this on my resume while job searching after graduation and the work I did so impressed my employer that they hired me sight unseen after seeing it on my resume and a short interview over the phone. They were also impressed by the complexity of some of the projects I was able to work on in the classroom, such as the senior capstone. I’ve been working for Boeing since graduation. I believe Liberty prepared me just as well if not better than my colleagues who’ve attended some of the best engineering schools in the country. Once I began working at Boeing as a Digital Signal Processing Engineer, I felt more than equipped to take on the work given to me and I owe that to the vast resources I was able to take advantage of at LU. I was ahead of the game by having already learned state of the art programming languages and systems and this allowed me to advance quickly in my career.

Personal story from my time at Liberty:

Senior year, I was a part of a capstone project. A team of myself and three other senior engineering students partnered with a local orthopedic physician to design and build a research device that soccer players could wear to collect data on the head impacts they experience when heading the ball.

The system was designed to be wireless and send data to a user interface on a laptop via a Bluetooth connection. We spent many late nights building and testing our prototype and we hit many obstacles. At one point, with just a few days left, we found our device was malfunctioning. We worked late into the night diagnosing the problem and discovered our microchip was fried. We worked quickly to remove and replace it in time to meet our deadline. Our team worked hard and was able to produce a working prototype in time for our presentation powered by a rechargeable 9V battery as well as a user-friendly GUI for live data viewing.

I am extremely proud of the program that is offered at Liberty University.  I cannot be more proud, as a father, of the person and the engineer that Kate has grown to become as a result of her studies at Liberty University.  Liberty, in my opinion, is leagues above every other University in our country, especially when it comes to character development and citizenship development.

I am sure Kate’s mother and I could have sent Kate to a school closer to home, or with a more recognized name, but at the end of the day, I am more concerned with the character of the person at the end of the education process.

Sincerely,

Mike Denyer,
HVAC Systems Engineer,

Base Operations & Spaceport Services Contract

NASA, Kennedy Space Center