Spotlight on… The College of Science, Engineering & Technology

Crystal Schultz

Mechanical Engineering Major

STEM fields have always been part of Crystal Schultz’s life. Her brother is in engineering and her sister in accounting and finance; her math and physics courses in high school were perennial favorites; and during her senior year in high school, her robotics team placed second in the world. In fact, a robotics competition first brought her to SVSU, and her interest in the sciences would profoundly shape some of her most memorable writing experiences at SVSU

Originally from Sterling Heights, Michigan, Schultz began taking classes at SVSU in Fall 2018. An SVSU President’s Scholarship recipient, Schultz cites some of her earliest classes as being influential. Although she describes herself as a “decent” writer when she started at SVSU, Schultz knew that writing wasn’t her passion. Classes taken through the Honors Program and taught by Dr. Fred Sundermann, an associate professor of geography, and Michael Heron,anassociate professor of social work,particularly challengedher withtheneedfor precision and brevity

These courses also helped her realize that if writing wasn’t a passion, choosing writing topics for which she had a passion would help her excel Perhaps that explains why a paper she coauthoredfor Honors II(HON 292) onthetopic of gender and income inequalityled to herreceiving a Braun Award for Writing Excellence in 2020 That paper’s focus on gender combined with her studies in the College of Science, Engineering & Technology (SE&T) and requirements for the Honors Program led to yet more writing. In Fall 2021, Schultz successfully defended her Honors thesis, “An SVSU Guide to Bridging the STEM Gender Gap ”

In her thesis, Schultz examined the number of female majors in SE&T’s various programs. WorkingwithSVSU’sOfficeofInstitutionalResearch,shelookedatdatacovering,approximately, a ten-year period, analyzing where most female SE&T students majored, the relationship between the number of female professors and female students, and the impact of registered student organizations on recruitment and retention. Some might simplify her work as an exercise in crunching numbers, but Schultz disagrees. This mechanical engineering major and mathematics minor knows her success as a communicator largely depended on a writerly awareness of audience. She names Rajani Muraleedharan Sreekumarid, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and the advisor of SVSU’s chapter of the Society of Women Engineers, as someone who really helped her think through the best ways to present all her data, keeping the needs of her readers front and center. Schultz also thanks Peggy Jones, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, for reading her classwork so closely, helping Schultz to be as accurate as possible on the page.

Conciseness, audience, and accuracy, Schultz notes, are always on her mind when she is composing. Sometimes these skills were refined in the many lab reports and tech writing assignments she wrote in her major. Sometimes they could be found in the emails and social media work she composed for student organizations like Forever Red (for which she has served as vice presidentofitsscholarshipraisingarm)orforHonorsCorps(forwhichshehasservedaspresident). Sometimes it was the many PowerPoint presentations she assembled as part of her internship at

Magna International, in Troy, Michigan.

Another thread running through these activities was the need to make a good impression through writing. As Schultz advises her STEM peers, “Don’t dismiss writing. It’s not about just ‘getting by’ as a decent writer; good writing will make you stand out” and can lead to success

Schultz recognizes that any type of writing is a learning experience; learning also can lead to more learning and writing to more writing. In fact, after graduating in May 2022, Schultz returned to Magna When she interned there, she worked with design engineers, completed failure analyses, and did benchmarking for electric vehicles. As the company’s newest product engineer, she’s now moving on to new projects, but writing whether for bosses, other engineers, or customers continues to be part of her career and will continue to be a way for her to learn and, ideally, to promote change