inperson “When I juxtaposed playing football versus academics, I knew I really didn’t want to pursue a career in football. I was doing it for fun and I was good at it, but I thought long-term about what I wanted to do with my career. That’s when I chose Morehouse.” When he received an engineering and partial football scholarship from the University of Tennessee and an academic scholarship from Morehouse, he knew he had come to a life-defining juncture. “When I juxtaposed playing football versus academics, I knew I really didn’t want to pursue a career in football. I was doing it for fun and I was good at it, but I thought long-term about what I wanted to do with my career. That’s when I chose Morehouse.” The decision to attend Morehouse as a Ronald E. McNair Scholar and Bill Gates Millennium Scholar proved “the greatest thing that I ever did in my life. Morehouse stimulated me far more than I expected.” He did, however, fill the sports void with running, serving as captain of the Morehouse track team in 2002. At Morehouse, Ball studied under Gregory Battle, who was then an associate professor of mathematics. Battle, now with Grambling State University in Louisiana, describes Ball as “ambitious in a nice way.” “He has a keen sense of intellect, that charisma for leadership, that passion for wanting to push things further,” said Battle. Ball went on to work in several impressive internships. At Kimberly-Clark Corp., he served as a project engineering intern, where he assisted in increasing the production of Micro-cuff projects from 30,000 to 60,000 a month. At Stryker Orthopaedics, he worked with an engineering team to design hip components to address congenital dysplasia of the hip in Japanese patients. And, as an intern at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, he developed a mockup exercise machine that is used to help train Russian astronauts. Srin Nagaraja was one of Ball’s mentors at Georgia Tech in the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program, where Ball worked as a researcher in an orthopaedic biomechanics laboratory investigating bone microdamage. “As a researcher, he had a strong work ethic and was driven to
Clinical Engineer Mario Ball ’07 has his sights set on pursuing a MBA.
achieve quality results,” says Nagaraja. “I believe those traits have set Mario up for success not only in his professional life, but also his personal life.” Ball graduated with a bachelor of science degree in applied physics from Morehouse in July 2007, followed within six months by a bachelor of science degree in biomedical engineering from Georgia Tech. It should be no surprise that Ball, who tackled both math and football in high school and, in college, took on the arduous Morehouse-Georgia Tech dual-degree program, is still seeking greater challenges. “Although I’m totally happy with where I am, I’m still striving for more,” he says. He plans to attend business school to pursue a degree in sales and marketing. “I’m definitely a success, but I don’t think I’m totally successful yet. Success is something that’s progressive.” ■
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