Why NC State

Terry Carroll cites Sputnik and his interest in rockets as his motivation to attend NC State to study aerospace engineering.

Interview on 2011-03-24 00:00:00 -0400

Transcript

00:00:00.000 Growing up one of the things that had happened was Sputnik had been shot by the Russians

00:00:07.732 and I wanted to build rockets. I in fact did this in science fairs,

00:00:12.778 ll this sort of stuff, from the sixth grade on.

00:00:15.342 In fact saw Sputnik, you know, when it was launched

00:00:18.710 and remember falling off the porch as I'm watching it go over. [laughter]

00:00:23.569 About killed myself. Thought it had hit me or something.

00:00:29.591 So anyway, I had started building rockets and every year had learned more and more.

00:00:33.676 Now this was, you know, NASA had not been that old at this particular point

00:00:37.555 and one of the things was you couldn't get the nice rocket engines you can get now

00:00:43.329 so I had to mix my own gun powder and that sort of thing and had several of them blow up

00:00:47.541 so my dad wanted me to have a bunker for that.

00:00:49.864 So needless to say there were only a handful of schools that you could study aerospace engineering

00:00:57.386 and fortunately one was in my backyard, so I went down to State and started off to be an aerospace engineer.