Sidney Davis

Sidney Davis is an engineering evangelist. Spreading the good news about the empowering nature of her field of study is clearly a labor of love.

As a Fulton Ambassador, she enthusiastically led fun and engaging activities during Girls Make-A-Thon events for visiting secondary school students. She also toured local high schools to share her experiences as an engineering student at Arizona State University.

“I absolutely loved going back to my own high school to give talks with my previous teachers to students who are right at the cusp of deciding where they want to take their own education,” Davis says.

In the same spirit, one of her favorite university memories is nine weeks of service as the lead summer camp counselor for the Fulton Schools Engineering Education Outreach department.

“We conducted hands-on design challenges to help expose the younger population to STEM,” Davis says. “These activities ranged from coding basic game programs and soldering lessons with the high school students to LEGO Mindstorms projects with the elementary and middle school students.”

According to Davis, overt enthusiasm is just an expression of knowing that the world of engineering is where she belongs. From the success of her first project for an introductory digital design course through to putting in long hours to complete an autonomous car for an embedded microprocessor systems class, the range of her experiences have always felt right.

This sentiment extends to her current work with General Dynamics, where Davis will continue as a software engineering intern while transitioning from her undergraduate degree to the “+1” year that will yield her master’s degree in computer engineering as part of the 4+1 accelerated graduate degree program.

“I’m focusing my education around digital signal processing and machine learning,” Davis says. “And I am lucky enough to be working on an internship project that is giving me exposure to both of these areas.”

For Davis, this good fortune is part of a trajectory that continues to affirm her educational and career choices.

“As they say, if you choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life,” she says.

Read about other exceptional graduates of the Fulton Schools’ spring 2020 class here.