Balancing Athletics & Engineering

Phillip Springsteen, ’20, always knew he wanted to be an engineer. “As a child, I was always tearing stuff apart and trying to make new things out of it,” he shared. “It didn’t always work out the best, as far as my parents said. A lot of times, things would end up kind of broken. But eventually I started creating some pretty interesting stuff.”

So when it was time for him to go to college, no one was surprised he was looking for a school with an engineering program. Springsteen was also planning to wrestle in college, as the sport had always been a large part of his life. “I wanted to make sure that I found a school where there was an engineering program and I could wrestle. I knew that if I went to a school with one or the other, I wouldn’t be quite as happy,” he said.

The University of Mary turned out to be the perfect fit. Head wrestling coach Adam Aho had seen Springsteen at a wrestling tournament and was impressed, so when Springsteen applied to Mary at the encouragement of his high school coach, Aho invited him to join the team.

“I really liked Coach Aho’s mentality,” Springsteen said. “And after speaking with Dr. Pilling (dean of the Hamm School of Engineering) about his plans for the engineering program, the University of Mary as a whole felt like a really good fit for me. And now, six years later, it really worked out.”

Now, Springsteen lives in Tuscon, AZ, where he is a software engineer at Raytheon Technologies Corporation. “Even though I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, I actually was very prepared to go into a software role thanks to the interdisciplinary way engineering classes are structured at Mary,” he said.

Raytheon is an aerospace and defense company. It is one of the largest aerospace, intelligence services, and defense providers in the world. Springsteen says the real-life experience he gained as a student at Mary, which included three internships, helped him secure this dream job.

“Other factors that have benefited me a lot in my career are flexibility and interacting with other facets of engineering,” Springsteen shared. “I became very good at understanding what each of the other facets of engineering does and where their strong points are, and I learned how to communicate with them in a way that they understand, so we can work together and arrive at a solution. When we face problems that expand beyond just one facet of engineering, we must work with other departments, and being able to communicate with them helps a lot.”

Springsteen’s time as a scholar-athlete at Mary has equally impacted his life. “In wrestling, you face a lot of adversity, and you have to learn how to keep going, even in the face of some difficult obstacles, some that may even seem impossible to overcome. As you keep pushing and preparing yourself, you overcome stuff that at first seems impossible, and eventually, you feel like you could basically overcome anything,” he said. “It gave me confidence. When I feel like I can’t do something, like when I’m faced with a task at work that I have no idea even how to begin, wrestling gave me the determination and the confidence to really push myself and try to develop a plan, execute it, and just keep going.”

Engineering is a challenging degree program, and being a scholar-athlete is a full-time job, so Springsteen had to remain focused to excel in the classroom and on the mat. “I basically spent all my free time working on one or the other,” he said. “Given that they are both things that I enjoy, it wasn’t hard to dedicate my time to the things that I love.”

Springsteen with Dr. Terry Pilling, Dean of the Hamm School of Engineering

His professors, coaches, and teammates were crucial to his success and helped him manage the balance. “Sometimes when my classes or labs in the engineering program overlapped a little bit with my practices, my coach allowed me to make up the practices outside of the typical practice time, and my other teammates would use their free time and practice with me just to make sure that I was still prepared out there on the mat,” he shared. “The same thing went the other way around with my engineering program. When I had tournaments that took me away from my classes, my professors were really understanding and flexible.”

Some of Springsteen’s best memories from his time at Mary are working on interdisciplinary projects in his engineering classes and competing in the national tournament for wrestling. He placed seventh at nationals his redshirt sophomore year and was second seed going into the national tournament his redshirt junior year, when the tournament got cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He was named an All-American for that year and decided to take an extra year of eligibility and begin his master’s degree at Mary.

Springsteen plans to finish his master’s in project management at the end of this summer and has already seen the positive impact the program is having on his career. He hopes to use his degree and experience to someday work as a project manager and help the software engineering and electrical engineering departments work better together.