Wednesday, June 17, 2020
How do you get into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)? Ask Michael Kraus, a 2020 graduate of Kaukauna High School, who is starting there this fall. His hard work, curiosity, and passion all kept him on a career pathway that seemed to be made just for him.
As part of a sixth-grade introductory class, for example, he built mini-rockets and drag cars powered by a CO2 cartridge. “I got hooked on the idea of mechanics,” says Kraus of the experience.
His next class had him build an egg drop—a gadget that could catch the fall of an egg and keep it from breaking. Students were given a short list of materials to make a prototype and got two test drops. Kraus’ first prototype failed, but after reviewing video of the drop and adjusting his model, his second one worked. “That felt really good.”
Next, the “cool aspect” of his Engineering 1 class, says Kraus, was “looking at specific data to see why it worked or didn’t work.” So he measured the drag on his Styrofoam car, the amount of force his homemade concrete could take, and the power generated by his wind turbine. And then made changes to improve them.
But SolidWorks Engineering topped them all. “The thing I loved about it was the freedom to play around with my own ideas,” he says. He learned SolidWorks, a three-dimensional design program that enabled him to work independently to build and test things.
SolidWorks also turned out to be a good foundation for a co-op job with August Winter & Sons, Inc., a mechanical contracting company in Appleton. He started as a Youth Apprentice (YA) in the summer of his sophomore year. After working alongside seasoned draftsmen on simple projects for about six months, he was set up with a product manager and was given more advanced projects. He’ll finish there this summer.
Is he ready for MIT? He already knows you learn by trial and error, and he’s persevered through plenty of errors. There are two things he’s heard about MIT: “It’s really hard, and there’s a great community of people there who are into learning and advancing”—just the place for someone who’s been advancing on a career pathway since sixth grade!
Kraus will be studying aerospace engineering at MIT—a lofty goal but then the sky’s the limit for this Kaukauna grad.