PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas (December 10, 2021) – Prairie View A&M University’s Summer Bridge Programs for incoming first-year students are thought of as orientation-like, get-to-know-your-school programs that can lead to a more successful transition to college. However, Daelyn Frank took her experience and amplified it.
Granted, this might have been predicted. Frank applied to Prairie View A&M knowing that she wanted to attend a Historically Black College/University and, moreover, that she wanted a degree in mechanical engineering. So when her Roy G. Perry College of Engineering Enhancement Institute (CE^2I) Summer Bridge Program took a field trip to a Lockheed Martin Corporation plant, she was over the moon.
“Watching jets being built right in front of my eyes was one of the most amazing things that I’d ever seen,” Frank said.
Frank served as a CE^2I camp counselor and later gained internships at Eaton in Operations Engineering and Lockheed Martin in Logistics Support Field Service.
April Lovelady, Ph.D., associate department head and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at PVAMU, found company sponsors to give students a chance to solve actual industry problems for their senior design projects. Frank was part of a team that tackled Lockheed Martin’s filament winding process.
“They were using filament winding to test properties of carbon fiber and glass fiber for panels on some of the space aircraft they were building,” Frank explained. “When winding, the filament would create slack and break, so they weren’t able to successfully wrap entire panels. My team needed to create a filament winder that could successfully wind the panel with filament without breaking it. We spent the spring and summer semester studying the process, different filament materials, and how to prevent too much tension occurring in the filament while being wound. Because of COVID, we weren’t able to actually build a prototype like the other classes before us, but we created a simulation using SIMULINK and AutoCAD.”
Lovelady attests to Frank playing a vital role in the project.
“Daelyn stepped up as the leader of her senior design team and did an excellent job holding her teammates accountable and ensuring that assignments were submitted on time,” Lovelady said. “She is methodical and well organized and will make Prairie View proud!”
Frank passed her senior design project with an A. She also received a full-time position version of her internship role with Lockheed Martin. This semester, however, she received and accepted a job offer with DOW Chemical Company in Michigan.
It’s a long way from Frank’s hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she took immense pride in her mother’s having gone back to school when Frank was in elementary school. “My mom is my biggest inspiration,” she said. “Seeing her accomplish something so great really made me want to be great.”
Having chosen PVAMU for its small class sizes and highly regarded engineering program, Frank wants to help others follow the same path.
“I aspire to be a successful mechanical engineer, but I also aspire to encourage other young Black women to follow their STEM dreams, even if it may be a male-dominated field,” Frank said. “I want to be the person that helps jumpstart other young Black engineers’ dreams.”
Frank said that while her path seems to have been assured when looking back at it, the many trials and tribulations along the way offer a perspective that she is eager to share with other PVAMU students.
“During my time at PVAMU, I applied to hundreds of internships,” Frank said. “I received many denials until the career fair that PVAMU hosted during my junior year. It absolutely changed my life. A guy in the Eaton booth told me his company’s goal was to hire as many students from Prairie View as possible, and after talking with me for 30 minutes, told me I’d be getting an email offering a chance to interview for an internship, and sure enough, I did. A couple of weeks after my interview, I got an internship offer. I connected with the guy later, and he expressed how well I’d done on the interview and how well prepared I was. My preparation was mostly due to the many interview preps from my department and the resume critiques I received from Career Services. That’s just a long way of saying that, without PVAMU, I would’ve never been prepared for that interview, my resume may not have been polished enough, and I may not have been picked out of the crowd like I was. That first internship opened many doors for me; the next summer, I had multiple internship offers to choose from.
It’s what I love the most about PVAMU: I feel like I have a team behind me. When I need help, I can go to anyone and receive the help I need.”
Visit www.pvamu.edu/academicaffairs/commencement/graduates to view this semester’s notable graduates and read their stories.
Visit www.pvamu.edu/commencement to learn more information about PVAMU’s upcoming fall graduation.
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