At 16, frustrated by an odd learning disability (and adults telling me what to do), I dropped out of high school and started a company. Basically, I ended up falling on my face. I worked a variety of dead-end jobs, some full time, some part time, some on commission. Eventually I got into Boeing as a duct fabricator, and enrolled at Olympic College just a few months after getting hired (in the middle of a strike). I borrowed textbooks and learned how to weld, and went on to get a vocational degree in welding. I continued my education and got two associates degrees, all on Boeing’s dime, using union benefits that didn’t back-charge me if I failed a class. I kept pushing, learning as much as I could from the “old guys” around me.

      During a transformative period in my life, I landed a four-year apprenticeship at Boeing, and became a jack-of-all-trades journeyman known as a Bluestreak Mechanic—our specialty is “making any part for any airplane with nothin’ but a 2D drawing,” and making it fast. I worked with some truly amazing journeyworkers at the peak of their career, including one guy in his 70s who could 3D model a hydroform block faster than anyone alive, but could hardly type his own name (a humbling experience for a cocksure computer nerd like me). After working in my trade and growing to love making custom tooling and parts, I left in 2020 when Boeing went into safe mode.

      Three weeks later, I submitted a proposal to NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts solicitation, and in 2021, I became the first undergraduate to win NIAC Fellowship. The concept was to use self-driving drilling robots called “borebots” to drill into the polar ice on Mars, in search of liquid water deep under an ancient glacier. In 2023, I won a second NIAC Fellowship award to investigate a way to “drink” rain through the skin of an airplane wing using capillary action, and search for life in raindrops—on Saturn’s moon Titan.

      A few months later, fifteen years after enrolling in that welding class during the 2008 strike, I graduated with a Mechanical Engineering degree from a satellite campus of Washington State University, which was on the same physical campus where I took that first welding class. I consider Olympic College my alma matter, and becoming a journeyman and NIAC Fellow to be my biggest accomplishments—so far.

      Now ask yourself: “What can we accomplish, together?”

      Drop me a line: quinn at quinnmorley dot com.