MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — With an Irish name and heritage, Emerson O’Rourke plans to spend the next five years in the land of the Fighting Irish — as an aerospace graduate teaching assistant and research assistant at the University of Notre Dame — after a stellar Middle Tennessee State University academic career.

With a fully funded (housing, food and tuition) financial aid package, O’Rourke, 22, will pursue his doctorate in aerospace and mechanical engineering at the prestigious South Bend, Indiana, university equally known for its football and athletic reputations and its R1 designation for very high research. He will be part of a research team helping further the understanding of the hypersonic boundary layer through a computational approach.

“I’m extremely excited for this opportunity and believe I will succeed,” said O’Rourke, formerly from Dunwoody, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, and a May MTSU graduate with a 3.97 GPA in aerospace technology and minors in mathand engineering technology (mechatronics emphasis). “And the way I will succeed is by taking it one step at a time.”

O’Rourke, who “discovered” flight at age 16, entered MTSU with a combined 46 dual-enrollment hours from Kennesaw State University and Chattahoochee Technical College. He planned on majoring in professional pilot. An online freshman aerodynamics class lit a fuse and he was hooked on technology.

Aerospace technology is a combination of mechatronics engineering, computer science and aviation, O’Rourke said.

The recipient of the Jean Jack aerospace scholarship was an active MTSU undergraduate research participant for two years. As the aerospace technology laboratory assistant for professor Nate Callender, he helped with seven capstone projects involving reducing noise produced by drone propellers and was awarded nine academic awards.

“Professor Callender’s been very influential from the start,” O’Rourke said. “He’s one of the reasons I changed majors to aerospace technology. … how he approaches math problems and how things work. I want to be like him and help other people.

“He’s a great leader. I can’t speak more highly of him. He has given me the opportunity to lead and develop. He has given me freedoms in the lab from being a student to a future leader in aerospace.”

O’Rourke took three of Callender’s classes: fundamentals of aerodynamics, aerospace technology research capstone and aircraft performance.

“He was an excellent student,” Callender said. “Always in class, asked good questions and performed well. He was an even better lab assistant. Emerson took full advantage of his time in the lab and became familiar with various pieces of equipment such as wind tunnels, thrust stands and computational fluid dynamics software.

“He organized and cleaned the space, set up new equipment when it arrived and even wrote a manual for a propeller thrust testing system. He was a great help to other students performing research in the lab and he was always willing to help with anything that needed to be done.”

O’Rourke said his junior year “was the most impactful year of my educational journey. I not only learned a lot from classes, I learned a lot about myself and how helping others can change one’s life. Without people supporting me and taking the time to help me, I would not be where I am today, heading to Notre Dame.”

While at MTSU, O’Rourke was steadfastly committed to helping others just as fellow students helped him. He tutored students at night and helped transfer students become acclimated to campus.

“Some transfer students do not natively speak English and I’ve taught them technical writing to help them succeed,” O’Rourke said. “I created a YouTube channel (@emersonorourke) to help students learn engineering by breaking everything down slowly and clearly, and I plan to make more videos in the future. I want to help others because I would not be where I am today without the people who supported me.”

Away from rigorous studies and Callender’s lab, O’Rourke took a break by attending 15 Blue Raider football games and some baseball games.

O’Rourke applied to four universities and chose Notre Dame over the University of Central Florida.

As for O’Rourke’s next venture, Callender said his former student and lab assistant “will do well at Notre Dame, and I look forward to hearing of his successes. He will be missed.”

— Randy Weiler (Randy.Weiler@mtsu.edu)