Keeping a Space Dream Alive

By many measures, Christian North ’26 qualifies as a nontraditional student. The multilingual native of Chile is older than the typical 18-to-22-year-old undergraduate and has worked in industry for the past two decades. Unlike most WPI students, he’s married and owns his own home, a fixer-upper near campus that the couple bought last year. He also transferred from Middlesex Community College, where he worked for six years as a part-time student to earn his associate’s degree in mechanical engineering.

If that’s not nontraditional enough, at 2 p.m. each workday, the aerospace engineering major switches from being a fully engaged, full-time WPI student to a full-time tech worker, logging on for the night shift as a hardware senior technical support analyst at Oracle, where he uses his Mandarin language skills to field calls from clients in a different time zone.

His days—and nights—are long, but he stays motivated by a lifelong dream to one day work for NASA. He credits an understanding wife, flexible and supportive supervisors at Oracle, fellow participants in the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Scholar Program, and a cadre of campus advisors and counselors—who stepped in quickly when they saw he was initially struggling—for helping him handle the dual lifestyle.

“I take it one day at a time,” he says. “I’ve never had a college experience in the normal way. This is no different.”

North was hired and trained by a German computer company to work in Taiwan, where he became the only employee fluent in Spanish, English, and—after months of intensive language lessons—Mandarin. (Although not fluent, he can also understand German and Portuguese.) He returned to Chile, where was recruited by Oracle in 2010. Seven years later he was transferred to Burlington, Mass., and he began taking classes at MCC. He thrived, consistently making the honor roll, starting an aerospace club, and even speaking at his commencement.

During the first months of the pandemic, he joined an online education webinar investigating strategies to get underrepresented populations of kids interested in going into STEM careers. When he mentioned to the organizers his hobby of building homemade drones using inexpensive parts, MIT Beaver Works Center Director Robert Shin challenged him to write a lesson plan for an online course as part of the MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute. Despite having no background in teaching or lesson plan creation, North put together an eight-week Design-Build-Fly course for 12- to 16-year-old students. The online course for low-income and underserved communities has run in the spring since 2021, and one for girls has run in the fall since 2021.

“When I start the classes, I give them stuff at the college level. I teach them how full-scale aircraft fly—I teach them the physics of it—but I don’t ask them to calculate anything. I tell them, ‘You don’t need to do the math, just understand the concepts.’” The class meets on Saturdays for three hours, including an hour of hands-on work, such as using a hair dryer to show how a paper airplane’s wings react to wind. “I design the course the way I wanted to learn as a kid so they are not afraid of things that are broken.”

He’s especially proud to receive updates from some of his former female students who are now engineering majors at universities such as Purdue, Michigan State, and MIT. One is at the US Air Force Academy and three are getting their pilot’s licenses.

North uses his own story to teach his students about the importance of resilience. He’s the first to admit he struggled initially as a WPI student.

“My first term was a mess,” he says. In addition to adjusting to his double life, his move to Worcester was more challenging than expected. “I’m really grateful for WPI because everyone jumped in to help,” he says, especially Director of Student Development and Counseling Sabrina Rebecchi, Dean of Students Emily Perlow, Director of Student Success and Support Lauren Buffone, Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Studies Debra Boucher, Senior Assistant Director of Academic Advising Tally Reeverts, and his aerospace engineering advisor, Associate Professor John Blandino. “I was dreaming of this my whole life, and I thought I was going to be expelled in my first term. Why did they jump in? I have no answers. I’m just grateful.”

A few obstacles remain in his career quest. Although he’s now doing well academically, his rough first term made qualifying for the WPI master’s program difficult. As North works to improve his GPA, he also picked up a minor in mathematics. US citizenship is a requirement to work at NASA, as well as to take flying lessons. A legal permanent resident, he becomes eligible to take the citizenship exam in 2026.

Due to his full-time job, he can’t fit an internship into his schedule, so he created his own training program by joining the Experimental Aircraft Association Chapter 196 in Stow, Mass. Every Saturday for two hours he works with Matt Overholt, a chapter member who is building an airplane from a kit, allowing North to learn how to cut sheet metal and install rivets.

“I want to know enough about how to build an aircraft so that when I’m an engineer talking to the technicians who are doing the building, we can speak that same language,” North says. Plus, he adds, “I’m a hands-on guy. I love to build stuff.”

Despite his busy life, he plans to continue to teach his course at Beaver Works.

“Teaching is my way of paying it forward, despite all the ups and downs in my life,” he says. “I feel fortunate to have had the opportunities that I had, and the only thing that I can do is help others.”