NC State Engineering
Spring 2010 Online Magazine

For an NC State engineering student, challenging classes and marathon lab sessions come with the territory. But if you're an engineering student-athlete, you're adding long bus rides, grueling practices, and the pressure that comes with competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Talk about multitasking.

Today more than 50 engineering students compete in NCAA Division I varsity athletics at NC State. On the field and in the classroom, they aim to win.

Brittany Strachan
Kernersville, NC
Computer Science
Basketball
Graduate Student

Brittany Strachan works best during her “power hours” — 10 p.m. and later. That’s when she gets her second wind after a long day of classes, practice and volunteer activities.

The 6-foot-3 basketball forward averaged a career-best 8.1 points and 5.3 rebounds per game in her final collegiate season that ended earlier this year. She scored a career-best 22 points during a game against the University of Southern California.

She was named four times to the ACC Academic Honor Roll and twice to the All-ACC Academic Team. Now she’s pursuing a master’s degree in computer science at NC State, in which she’ll hone her software development skills and take classes in artificial intelligence and network security.

A member of organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Women Empowering Society Together, Strachan was also a mentor for the NC State Minority Engineering Programs.

On the court, she played part of her basketball career for the iconic Kay Yow, who died in 2009 after 34 years of coaching at NC State.

“I’m big on faith, especially with Coach Yow,” Strachan said. “I feel like we were given talents, and we were blessed with certain opportunities not to just hold to ourselves, but to share with others.”

William Teller
King and Queen County, VA
Nuclear Engineering
Rifle
Junior

Imagine the cap of a Gatorade bottle. In the middle is a target — a half-millimeter dot that is the size of a period on the end of a sentence. It’s William Teller’s job to hit that target during matches. Sounds easy, right?

Teller is one of the top shooters on the NC State rifle team. If you’re thinking about William Tell — the Swiss folk hero who famously used his crossbow to shoot an apple from the top of his son’s head — he’s not a relative.

“The unique aspect of rifle was something that allured me,” Teller said. “As opposed to moving quickly, most of the time you’re trying to actually move as little as possible and stay very still.”

This is Teller’s third year balancing the demands of a collegiate athlete with a major in nuclear engineering. Without a home shooting range at NC State, each match is “away,” and Teller has learned to buckle down with schoolwork on the road.

Teller has read about the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, and it hasn’t changed his mind about pursuing a career in nuclear engineering. He interned at the Surry Power Station in Virginia this past summer, which generates nearly 1,600 megawatts of electric power from its two nuclear reactors.

“I think that nuclear energy is the direction that the US is going to end up going after oil and coal start running out,” he said.