Career Paths: Persistence Leads Wyatt Bryan to his Perfect Live
Football's career scoring leader now a rocket scientist
Mike Brohard
Wyatt Bryan is finding the real world has some of the same challenges of a football season – the best-laid plans don’t always play out immediately.
Persistence is key.
Graduating as a scholar athlete with a degree in mechanical engineering doesn’t guarantee immediate employment, and in his case, Bryan is glad it didn’t. After wondering what was wrong, he not only landed the right job, but the Rams’ career scoring leader with 337 points hit what he considered “The Job” with Blue Origin, in Van Horn, Texas.
“I am so stoked. To me, this is the coolest job in the world,” Bryan said. “I mean, I even applied for any job in test operations that would be the coolest title. That’s the fun stuff. You get to test the rockets. You’ve got to go in these giant bunkers, and they have these big control rooms in there and you just fire engines.”
If you want to know how much he wanted this job, consider this: Van Horn, Texas isn’t a bustling metropolis. It’s about two hours away from El Paso, so Bryan bought himself an RV to live in while he works there.
He’s fired up about that, too.
“It’ll be like permanent camping,” he joked.
None of this is a surprise to Anthony Marchese, CSU’s associate dean for academic and student affairs in the Walter Scott Jr. College of Engineering, as well as a mechanical engineering professor who served as Bryan’s advisor for his senior honors thesis.
Bryan’s thesis was his senior design project, where he worked in a group of 10 on a project named Aries 5 as they designed, machined and tested a bio-propellant liquid rocket they hoped to launch to 10,000 feet. Marchese called it a yearlong project requiring anywhere from 20-30 hours a week to finish.
That was the class Bryan said launched his dreams, mainly because of the way the engineering program at Colorado State is structured.
“The engineering program at CSU is very hands on,” Marchese said. “We pride ourselves on having a lot of design projects, and mechanical engineering is particularly intense in that regard.”
Some are sponsored by industry, and some, like Bryan’s, were competition based – The Spaceport America Cup.
There were 120 teams, and they didn’t win their category based on the metrics. However, they were the only one to attempt to launch a bio-propellant liquid rocket they designed and built, and Bryan was part of the four-person propulsion team.
“In terms of what they set out to do, they were in a class by themselves,” Marchese said.
The rocket launched to 9,825 feet. Marchese said that is the best output in competition history. Half of the field bought a motor; a few did hybrids, but CSU was one of only two teams in the history of the competition to try liquid, and they were the first to successfully launch.
Through football, Bryan earned an opportunity to connect with leaders of the business world, the result of being a semifinalist for the prestigious William V. Campbell Trophy through the National Football Foundation. For the third year, the organization held the Campbell Summit, open to all nominees, Aug. 17-19 at Stanford University.
“I didn’t even really know it was a thing,” Bryan said of the summit. “They paid for absolutely everything, and it was great. It was definitely an awesome experience.”
He spent the weekend attending job expositions, listening to speakers and having conversations with people he would not have had contact with before. Bryan earned job interviews on his own with Boeing and Blue Origin.
“I was already able to connect with a few people on LinkedIn,” he said. “There was a career expo there one day, and there weren’t many engineering jobs or aerospace companies in attendance. A lot of it was banking and real estate, but I did get some advice, because there were a few engineers there, and they were helping me with how to go about an interview.”
It was an experience he didn’t expect, but one he fully enjoyed. His advice for anybody granted the chance is to grab hold and listen and learn.
“I would highly recommend it to anybody who gets the chance,” Bryan said. “I hope Colorado State keeps nominating people, because it was a valuable experience for me.”
“The likes of Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and United Launch Alliance, they seek out the CSU teams,” Marchese said. “The fact Blue Origin took interest in Wyatt, I’m not surprised. The interesting part is he got a late start and it worked in his favor. "Anthony Marchese, associate dean for academic and student affairs, Walter Scott Jr. College of Engineering
Football is hard. Bryan knows this, having had great seasons and times of struggle. Remember, he missed a chip-shot game-winner against New Mexico as a senior, only to come through with a second chance.
Still, it’s not rocket science. That’s what he’ll do now.
Yet, for a spell, he was starting to wonder. While he and the CSU team were at the competition, they were constantly being watched and spoken to by leaders in the industry, and some of his teammates had already landed in the field.
Marchese said the competition really put Bryan behind in the job search, but it actually paid off for him in the end.
“The likes of Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and United Launch Alliance, they seek out the CSU teams,” Marchese said. “The fact Blue Origin took interest in Wyatt, I’m not surprised. The interesting part is he got a late start and it worked in his favor. Some of his teammates had already accepted a job with another company, and I know that one of his teammates is – we have a running joke – is kinda jealous, because his is more of a desk job. Testing rockets out in the desert is what they all want to do.”
Bryan will be a test operations engineer, working on some of the company’s current engine projects, some which are still in development, all of which, Bryan said, are reusable.
“This particular job, it’s really hands on. The one thing I think CSU does, more than other schools, they have a whole class that is just a machining class, a manufacturing class,” he said. “These senior design projects, you are forced to be in a work-like environment, working with a group of people to accomplish a goal, and it’s very similar to what we do out there. It’s almost exactly, just a smaller scale.”
While living in an RV. The truth is, he’s familiar with the arrangement.
Marchese said Bryan rented an RV to use as a laboratory at the competition, and the CSU team got in trouble because they were parked in the wrong spot.
This time, Bryan can’t think of a better place in the world to settle into his.