Aerospace Engineer Flies High Teaching Community College
This articled originally appeared in Slice of MIT.
A little over a decade ago, Stella Jang Litwinowicz SM ’03 was at the height of her career as an executive at Sikorsky Aircraft, the Connecticut-based helicopter manufacturing company. Starting as a flight controls engineer, Litwinowicz had risen through increasingly important roles in operations and business development. As she climbed the corporate ladder, however, she found herself dissatisfied and disconnected from the work. “There was nothing wrong with the company, but when you move up enough, it becomes more difficult to describe what you do for a living,” she says.
In 2015, she made a surprising career pivot, to become a professor of engineering and mathematics at Connecticut State Community College Housatonic in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
“It was amazing right away,” she says. Unlike at a four-year private university where students generally perform according to expectations, she teaches an academically diverse student body—including talented students who needed to choose an affordable school; students who struggled emotionally in high school and are now turning their lives around; and adult learners from other countries learning English alongside physics. “You meet people who inspire you in so many different ways, and who want to make their lives better,” she says. “It’s the best adrenaline hit to see somebody start to believe in themselves.”
Litwinowicz arrived in the US with her family from Korea at age 10. She studied classical piano and bass guitar at Jacksonville University in Florida, until a night lying on a beach looking up at the stars made her impetuously decide she wanted to go into astronomy. After earning her undergraduate degrees in music performance and physics, she was admitted to MIT in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, where she initially struggled with the rigor of the engineering coursework. “I was woefully unprepared,” she says. Fortunately, one of her professors reassured her that MIT knew what it was doing when it accepted her. So, she knuckled down and caught up.
She now applies that experience to teaching at Housatonic, sometimes providing basic algebra help alongside lessons in physics and engineering. “I take it as a point of pride to be able to understand each student’s perspective and try to explain things in a way that make sense to them,” she says. In doing so, Litwinowicz often draws upon her performance and musical composition background, including a two-year stint trying to make it in a rock band before Sikorsky. “You have to be creative in interacting with students—you can’t just say this is the proven pedagogical formula.”
One student, for example, struggled in physics until Litwinowicz was able to present the work as a series of puzzles to solve. “They learned that physics is fair and equitable—if you do the right thing, you are going to get the right answer,” she says. That student completed a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and is now working as an engineer.
Another student was naturally talented but came from a difficult family situation and lacked confidence. Litwinowicz mentored him and helped him apply to the University of Connecticut; he has since secured a spot in a PhD program at Stanford in electrical engineering, receiving both a National Science Foundation and a Stanford graduate fellowship. “The day I opened that email I ‘ugly cried,’” Litwinowicz admits. “I didn’t get remotely that emotional when I got my own MIT acceptance letter.”
She says such experiences are why she never regrets giving up her role as a corporate executive. “This is the most important work I’ve ever done in my life,” Litwinowicz says. “As long as there is a student who needs me, I’m going to keep doing this.”
