I Am Elon with Haydn Stucker ’23

As an Honors Fellow double majoring in computer science and engineering, Haydn Stucker ’23 wants to put a rocket into space. Or to be an astronaut on that rocket. Although that sounds like a dream, he may actually make it happen thanks to his tenacious work ethic.

After applying for close to 500 internships, Haydn’s persistence was rewarded with a semester-long position in the spring as a manufacturing engineering intern at Precor in Whitsett, North Carolina. He impressed his supervisors and before the semester was over, he landed a three-month summer internship at the company’s office in Seattle.

“I’m learning things that you don’t learn in classrooms and making connections with really cool people who want me to succeed,” he says. “I’m glad I’m doing it now rather than in my first job.”

A self-described “math addict” since junior high, he worked as a math tutor through high school. At Elon he loves investigating how math can be used to solve real-world problems. Haydn says that’s basically what engineering and computer science really are: Math concepts repurposed to help people and to build new things.

Haydn’s interests aren’t only tied to mathematics, and he gets excited when he talks about trying new things. In fact, he cites his first-year honors seminar course, Politics of Erasing History taught by Professor Laura Roselle, as his favorite course so far. Beyond offering insightful lessons about how history can be skewed by politics, the class broadened his thinking about teaching methodology.

“On day one, Dr. Roselle says, ‘You guys are picking what you want to learn within this theme,’” he says. “In STEM, it’s expected that a subject like thermodynamics is going to be about certain things in certain order. It was awesome to have a class that wasn’t structured like that. I experienced learning in a totally new way, and my thinking went five feet wider on both sides.”

Haydn is Elon and one of many stories that are part of our “I Am Elon” series.