Student spotlight: Dallan Schoenberger

Dallan Schoenberger grew up playing and watching a lot of sports, especially tennis, golf, and the beautiful game he fell in love with: soccer.

His favorite team is Chelsea. He's watched them play on their American tours, and he toured their Stamford Bridge stadium during a summer trip to London. Although it was the off-season and there were no matches, that disappointment was counterbalanced by the stadium tour experience. "There was no one else there, just me and my family," he remembers.

Schoenberger loves to travel to Europe and is looking forward to going to a Chelsea match someday. "I can only imagine the atmosphere," he says.

As an undergraduate at Saint Francis University, Schoenberger played Division I soccer. He finished his chemistry bachelor's degree in three years and, with his remaining year of NCAA eligibility, was able to play a season with the men's soccer team at Carnegie Mellon when he started his master's degree in chemical engineering.

It's rare for a chemical engineering graduate student to be a varsity athlete. Schoenberger says both the department and the team were very helpful. "Some teams are very competitive with each other, but everyone here is so close," he says. "The team was very welcoming, and the seniors do a great job of including everyone."

He felt similarly welcomed in the Department of Chemical Engineering. During his visit to campus as an admitted student and now in his first year in the program, Schoenberger appreciates that faculty talk to him on his level. "It has made me feel really comfortable and accepted here," he says.

Schoenberger has also connected with fellow master's students and Ph.D. students. Weekly happy hours and events organized by the Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Association (ChEGSA) and the Chemical Engineering Master's Student Association (ChEMSA) bring people together. "Being able to talk to people from different places, to hear about their stories, is so important," he says.

Schoenberger works side-by-side with Ph.D. students in Coty Jen's lab. He was inspired to join their emissions research by an air quality engineering course he took during his first semester. Schoenberger is trying to collect the compound phycocyanin from algae cultures made from different lake water samples. The Jen Lab studies how gaseous compounds emitted from various sources react to form and grow aerosol particles in the atmosphere and how those particles affect air quality and the environment.

Schoenberger enjoys hands-on work like that in the Jen Lab. Preparing for a career in experimental research, he recognized that he also needed computational skills. He chose the chemical engineering master's program at CMU because it gives him "the best of both worlds:" a computational focus and hands-on research. In his core courses, he's learning computational tools including Python and LaTeX.

The master's program is building his confidence beyond technical skills for his job search. As he puts together his resume, writes cover letters, and prepares for interviews, Schoenberger feels well-supported by faculty, as well as staff from the university's Career and Professional Development Center.

With the expertise and the network he's building at CMU, Schoenberger is looking forward to finding yet another welcoming team: the one on which he'll start his career.