Alex James

Let’s see, for classes I generally preferred math, computers, and to some degree science class (I can’t say I really enjoyed biology even in high school) although social studies was normally pretty good too. I liked many of my English teachers like Mrs. Tyson, Mrs. Stephens, and Mr. Stephens despite not really liking the class itself. Outside of school I read a lot of books. I played football in the county league in 6th-8th grade and I also fenced (foil) for three years in middle school. I don’t remember doing much outside of school in elementary and middle school. I feel like I generally went to school, had some friends but didn’t do much else on weekends and such. I do remember talking to my teachers a lot at lunch in middle school. Mrs. Johnstone normally sat with a couple of us when we were eating lunch in the courtyard and I’d visit Mrs. Tyson a decent amount.

I went to Sidwell Friends for high school which was very different than Nysmith. It was in the city and also had a much stronger slant towards liberal arts. My two big activities in high school were running and robotics. I ran cross country, indoor track, outdoor track as a 1mi, 2mi, 5k and steeplechase guy. Robotics then took up much of my time outside of school. We competed in FTC in the fall and underwater robotics in the spring. I also was part of the outing club which did a lot of outdoors trips. That’s where I got into climbing and camping. For college, I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Champaign is a centrally located cornfield in central Illinois). I majored in engineering physics and aerospace engineering with a minor in materials science. I basically specialized in material strength prediction and fracture mechanics of composites and metals, condensed matter physics, and numerical methods. As a result, a lot of my time was taken up taking math and engineering classes. Outside of school, I was on the board of the climbing club for three years and would frequently go climbing in southern Illinois on weekends and breaks. I’ve been all over the country climbing. I also was in Sigma Phi Delta fraternity which was most of my social life outside of the climbing club.

My only internship in college was at Boeing after junior year. I stayed in Champaign after sophomore year to do a physics lab/research. I was out in Seattle area working in Composite Structural Methods and Allowables which basically comes up with the strength of different materials and the methods to analyze an airplane part. Those tools get passed out to the different airplane programs for use in actually building and designing the aircraft you fly on. For my full time position, I hired into 767 Airframe structural design where I worked on designing parts in the wing. The 767 at this point is a cargo freighter aircraft and also the KC-46A Tanker for the Air Force. I’m in the middle of transferring back to Allowables where I’ll be doing a lot of composite fracture mechanics. Seattle is an amazing city and I really like it. It has so much outdoor stuff between hiking, climbing, mountaineering etc that I am always busy on the weekends. The city is also very laid back, has tons of outdoor spaces, great food, and great beer. Contrary to popular belief, it does not rain all the time. The summer is actually like 75 and sunny (We got rain about 4 days this summer, hence all the wildfires).

Nysmith was very good at making me do things that I really did not want to do. This was really good because it forced me to get experiences that I would not have gotten had I been left to my own devices. I would not have gone anywhere close to being on stage for a play or something without being required to. Or, to be up in front of lots of people presenting a science fair project. Because Nysmith forced me to do that, I knew that I was capable of it for those situations later in life where I did have to do public presentations.

Nysmith is very good at academics and in many cases has you doing things that you normally wouldn’t hit until later in school. This could be in terms of math class progression or what books you read in English. Make sure you leverage that in high school. Don’t just go with the flow. If you belong in a higher math class, push for it. Or if you’re reading the same book again, use what you learned the previous time to get more out of the book. There were more than a couple times in high school that I ended up redoing some things that I had done at Nysmith and not really putting any effort into it.