Freelance Engineering

Adipietro, a native of Westport, Connecticut, loved working on cars growing up with family and friends, which initially made him want to pursue a career in automotive engineering. But he wasn’t sure how to get started, particularly as a college student with no experience. One day he had an idea while scrolling through a Facebook group for car enthusiasts.

“I sent a message saying, ‘I’m an engineering major, and I’m looking to do some design work. Does anyone have any parts they would like to be designed in CAD [computer aided design]?’” he said.

Adipietro said he thought no one would respond, but soon after he posted, “there were 30 people DM-ing me with dimensions and different projects that they needed to be completed.”

The experience he gained as a “freelance automotive engineer” helped him put concrete work experience on his resume, which he brought to a Fordham Career Fair. That’s where he connected with Standard Motor Products.

“They liked what I was doing with the freelance engineering, and I ended up being a mechanical engineering intern there for one summer,” he said.

Pivoting to Space

But Adipietro said that while he liked automotive engineering, he left looking for a more fast-paced industry working with leading edge technology to solve problems.

“I spoke to Professor [Martin] Sanzari, and he told me he had a similar experience. He suggested that I look into the aerospace industry,” Adipietro said. So he did, and soon sent out more than 100 applications.

“I was getting kind of burnt out from sending those applications out, so I ended up just starting to send cold emails—which is a pretty humbling experience—but it’s definitely a good way to reach out to people directly,” he said.

He heard back from one recipient, Psionic, an aerospace and defense company, which sent him a test project on a Friday: Design, model, 3D print, and ship a component part to their office by Monday that they needed for a meeting with the U.S. special forces.

With a lot of hustling, he managed to complete the challenge and get it all done and shipped. That helped land him a job there for about a year, where he said he “fell in love with startups” and got “really, really interested in rockets.”

Launching His Career and Others

This newfound interest inspired Adipietro to create the Fordham Rocket Propulsion Lab, a club that allows students to learn more about rockets and aerospace. He also leveraged his work at Psionic to land his next internship—a mechanical engineering position at Astra, an aerospace company. And he got some advice along the way from Bernadette Haig, a 2018 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate who is a mechanical engineer there.

“She was incredibly helpful in terms of figuring out what that [career] timeline looks like and realizing that, even if there’s not an aerospace program at Fordham, there’s definitely a route to get to aerospace, and there’s definitely a route to get to other industries,” he said.

After his internship at Astra, Adipietro was certain that aerospace is where he wanted to work. In fact, right after it, he and a few of his friends launched Ensemble Propulsion Systems, a passion project where they “design, build, and test hybrid and liquid rocket motors.” And he also began applying to jobs for after college, including one at SpaceX, a spacecraft engineering company.

At SpaceX, the intense hiring process includes multiple rounds of interviews and, if the candidate advances, culminates with a presentation to a team of engineers followed by individual rounds of questioning from each of them.

“Every single person from the team interviews you for 30 minutes and by the end of that, it was like the whole room is filled up with equations, but it’s all equations that I learned here at Fordham,” he said.

Adipietro said his internship experiences, paired with the technical and communications skills he learned at Fordham provided him with a solid foundation.

“Going to Fordham was so helpful, and I cannot stress it enough,” he said. He cited an example of when, as part of an interview process, he had to submit a piece of writing describing the project he was working on.

“When we were in the interview, after [the interviewer] read it, he said, ‘Oh, you’re great at writing, and you really don’t see that,’” Adipietro said. “Having a very well-rounded education is definitely helpful for going out there in the industry.”

He also encouraged other students to find what they’re passionate about because that will help them be successful.

“Say there’s one person who wants to get a job for the money, then there is one person who is thinking about the industry from the second they open their eyes in the morning. The latter will have a higher chance of getting the job and being successful in industry,” he said, adding. “Pursue your passion.”

Bal initially majored in biology at Fordham, but he switched to computer science in his junior year. Working closely with Damian Lyons, Ph.D., director of the University’s Robotics and Computer Vision Lab, he used technology originally associated with gaming to help herpetologists at the zoo track and study the movements of Kihansi spray toads. The toads had been classified as extinct in the wild in 2009, but in the past decade, scientists at the Bronx Zoo, headquarters of the Wildlife Conservation Society, have been breeding the toads on site and helping to reintroduce them to their native habitat in Tanzania.

According to Lyons, Bal expanded the code to effectively track the toads solely using depth imagery. He also added a color-tracking feature so that made it possible to zero in on the toads when they moved, such as jumping onto a leaf. Bal also created new software to generate behavior analytics.

As an undergrad, Bal also was a volunteer EMT with Fordham University EMS, and he worked as a software engineer intern at Amazon, an experience he said he helped him not only get job offers but also learn “how to work professionally, scalably, and consistently in the real world.”

Today, he’s a software engineer at SpaceX, working on ground network software systems for Starlink, the aerospace manufacturer’s satellite internet service. But one day down the line, Bal said he hopes to launch his own company.

What Fordham course has had the greatest influence on you and your career path so far? How and why was it so influential?
Professor Damian Lyons’ Brains and Behaviors in Beasts and Bots. It was basically a class where we looked at different animal behaviors and then emulated them with robotics (e.g., a bug might walk around until it hits a wall, then it’ll turn and keep moving until it hits a wall, rotate, and so on. At one point we made a robot that did the same). It was a lot of fun, but I would say research outside of class was way more impactful. Classes are good for developing baseline skills, but the best way to solidify your knowledge, grow it, and put it to work is to utilize the resources available to students on campus outside of required coursework, like labs and research opportunities.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
Definitely Lyons. Without the opportunities and encouragement he provided, I’m certain I wouldn’t have made professional progress at the same rate that I have. He introduced me to complex, real-world problems and helped me understand how to break them down into manageable chunks to create something useful. That overall thought process and all of the small nuances I learned along the way have been invaluable in my professional career.

What are you optimistic about?
I’m optimistic about our future. I think that the next few generations will have an extremely large impact on humanity’s trajectory due to their intersection with powerful and exciting technologies that they’ve grown up with, as opposed to previous generations that still remember what it was like to not have smartphones or the entire internet at their fingertips.