"Take the initiative."
The senior from Houghton has been involved since her first year on campus, on her way to dual majoring in business and scientific and technical communication.
“I’ve also enjoyed all the organizations I’ve been involved in,” she says. “It was especially good, as an STC major, getting into Clean Snowmobile Challenge [as a first-year student], which is mostly engineering students. It gets rid of the ‘us vs. them’ mentality.” For the snowmobile group, she began as their web page designer, moved on to document templates and logo design, and now, using her business skills, she’s become treasurer, overseeing a $19,000 annual budget.
Nikki says she joined Circle K with a similar passion: to help others, and she had a very rewarding experience from “people appreciating what you do” within the student branch of the Kiwanis service organization. And, she said she’s gained time management and people management skills through Circle K, a nice complement to the hands-on learning with the Clean Snowmobile Challenge team.
Through it all, she’s learned how to market herself and realized that you need to be well-rounded. She believes that “you’ve got to make your own opportunities and learn as much as you can.”
This attitude has paid off. She won the prestigious Michigan Tech Fund Merit Award this spring, and she’ll spend this summer as the first non-engineering intern from Tech to go to Cummins Inc. “I’ll work as a technical communications specialist, developing a web-based documentation project in their oil and gas division,” she says.
Something tells us she’ll succeed there.
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