Gabriel Stillman, Music to Materials Science & Engineering

Gabe Stillman started out as a musician. His love of music stemmed from high school when he decided to try playing the saxophone as an extracurricular activity .  Throughout Gabe’s undergraduate career, he studied music education at  Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, IL  University. Gabe continued to pursue music education by student teaching throughout the school districts in Illinois. Gabe decided to join the US Army band to continue to play the saxophone. During his time with the army band, he began to become very interested in engineering as a profession and decided to pursue engineering further.

“While I was in the army band, I began taking the fundamental science and mathematics courses online and in night school to jumpstart my engineering career,” said Gabe.

When he applied to  LEAP, Gabe was looking for a focus that would help solve major issues within our society, such as technology, health and climate emergencies. Gabe looked for a master’s program that could allow him to work on solving  these larger problems. This drive for problem solving led him to a master’s in Material Science and Engineering.

Gabe believes that the LEAP helped him to gain the fundamental tools to expand his engineering knowledge beyond his focus area in engineering. Gabe thinks that without LEAP,  he would have had a harder time grasping issues surrounding engineering that may come up in a professional setting.

“ I now feel confident in wherever I end up working, even if I didn’t necessarily get a degree in whatever that discipline is in, I can then go out and learn and read the literature. I know how to learn a new concept and how to learn about how to design something, even if you haven’t learned it before,” said Gabe.

While studying at BU, Gabe landed an internship at Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, in Cambridge, MA. Gabe always wanted to be involved in public service and he was happy to gain real-life engineering experience in a major engineering organization, and apply his engineering knowledge to better the public good. “Volpe is a part of the department for transportation and we kind of function like a consulting firm. If other federal institutions, the highway and railroad administration or even NASA  need some nerds to help do some work, we help them finish that engineering work.” said Gabe.