Building, Designing, and Project Management Drive Kyla Sanders to the MET
By Jonathan Petty,
Director of Enrollment Marketing and Communications –
Kyla Sanders was supposed to complete her internship last August.
She didn’t.
Not for a lack of effort. The fact is she was so good at the job that the company that hired her asked her to stay on. Three months later, Sanders is still working at her internship and taking classes to complete her degree in Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) at Texas A&M University–Central Texas.
From Harker Heights to A&M–Central Texas
A graduate of Harker Heights High School, Sanders said she wouldn’t be where she is today if not for teachers who believed in her. Afterall … math.
“When I was young, I hated math,” Sanders said. “I was failing math really bad in elementary school until I had a certain teacher. She kind of sat me down and she took her time with me.”
That teacher, who invested in her student, propelled Sanders down an educational path from which she hasn’t deviated.
“From the fourth grade all the way up to where I am now, I’ve gotten all As in math,” she said.
Sander became so comfortable with mathematics that she decided to take pre-algebra courses from Central Texas College while in high school. She aced those classes as well. Her talents for understanding the data and manipulating the numbers didn’t go unnoticed.
“My teacher told me that I was really good in math and really good in science and I should look into engineering,” Sanders said.
Setting Her Career Path
Despite the encouragement, engineering wasn’t always at the top of her career list. Sanders aspired to be a nurse. That is, until she took an anatomy class. A quick foray into figuring out what parts of the body belong where and how they’re connected and it was back to math class.
“I thought I might be better at algebra than anatomy,” she said.
In high school, Sanders became interested in the process of designing projects and tools. The challenge of having an idea and turning it into a functional plan was appealing. She planned to follow her dream of design into civil engineering, focusing on structural design. By happenstance, she ended up in the MET program and has found it every bit as fascinating and challenging. She said her MET training is feeding her hunger for structural design as well as project management and implementation.
“We’ve learned a lot about what types of materials are best for certain projects,” she said. “What types of materials last longer. What types of materials can endure the most stress and strain. Things of those sorts.”
Currently, students are putting that knowledge to the test on a project requested by Fort Hood to develop a type of wagon or sled that can carry materials around a warehouse based on GPS-style location mapping.
“Right now, we’re in the beginning stages. We’re thinking of ideas on how to build it,” she said.
This kind of hands-on learning and working closely with professors is what keeps her in the program. She admitted that at times things get a little difficult and she doesn’t always handle stress constructively. She said needs a little personal attention to keep her involved.
“Something about me … if it’s hard, I don’t want to do it,” Sanders grinned. “[This is] an engineering course, so it’s a little bit difficult. But the teachers are big on communication. If you don’t understand, they want to know. If you don’t understand, there are office hours, before school, after school. There hasn’t been a time that I’ve told my professors, ‘Hey, I need to meet’ and they haven’t been available.”
An Affordable Education
Sanders said the move into the MET program at A&M–Central Texas was both practical and economical. TAMUCT professors presented to one of her classes at Central Texas College and described the program. She saw how her community college credits would transfer and that the process would be relatively easy with plenty of help if she had any questions.
Along with the ease of transfer, Sanders said the cost savings was a huge factor.
“A&M–Central Texas was way cheaper than any other, bigger, four-year universities that I looked at,” she said. And she found that she didn’t lose any credits. Other universities would have required her to take up to 10 additional classes.
Career Dreams
Of course, earning a degree is all about finding a career path, and for Sanders, she may already be at her starting point. Still working at Bartlett Electric Coop. for her extended summer internship, Sanders hopes the job will lead to full-time employment when she graduates in May 2027.
But her dreams don’t end there—mapping electrical equipment to neighborhood grids so service members know where to work when the power goes out. She hopes to advance and build a successful, long-term career associated with her degree.
“I would love to work in project management,” she said. “Just being a part of that design aspect and keeping tabs on everything. I am learning that a little bit more every day.”
And isn’t learning a little more every day what education is all about?
