ABOUT

Samuel Dearing

U.S. CITIZEN · PREVIOUSLY HELD DoD SECRET CLEARANCE · ELIGIBLE FOR REINSTATEMENT

I'm an aerospace engineering student at Arizona State, and I spend the rest of my week fixing and building real hardware — as a design engineer at Landco Power, on three ASU engineering teams, and in my own shop.

Most of what I know came from parts that failed. Diagnosing industrial generators with no schematics taught me to reason from symptoms, and designing replacements for the pieces that keep breaking taught me to design for the load a part actually sees. That's the same approach behind everything on this site.

STUDYING
Aerospace Engineering (Astronautics), ASU
EXPECTED
May 2028
BASED IN
Phoenix / Tempe, AZ
RESUME (PDF)

EDUCATION

Education & credentials

Arizona State University

EXPECTED 2028

B.S.E. Aerospace Engineering (Astronautics) — Tempe, AZ

GRADE POINT AVERAGE
3.66/ 4.00
DEAN'S LIST — THREE SEMESTERS

RELEVANT COURSEWORK — COMPLETED

  • Mechanics: Particles & Rigid Bodies I & II
  • Mechanics of Materials
  • Computer-Aided Engineering I
  • Introduction to Fluid Mechanics
  • Circuits I
  • Advanced Mathematical Methods for Engineers
  • Modern Differential Equations
  • Linear Algebra
  • Calculus for Engineers I–III
  • University Physics I & II
  • Programming in MATLAB

IN PROGRESS — FALL 2026

  • Aerodynamics
  • Aerodynamics Laboratory
  • Thermodynamics
  • Signals and Systems I
  • System Dynamics and Control I
  • Applied Experimental Statistics

Marine Military Academy

CLASS OF 2023

High school diploma — Harlingen, TX

GPA
4.14 weighted
CLASS RANK
9 of 51

CERTIFICATIONS

  • CSWA — Certified SOLIDWORKS Associate

    DASSAULT SYSTÈMES · 240/240

  • Python Data Structures

    UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN · COURSERA

  • Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python)

    UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN · COURSERA

EXPERIENCE

Design Engineer — Landco Power

TEMPE, AZ · MAY 2024 — PRESENT · STARTED AS GENERATOR TECHNICIAN / HEAVY DIESEL MECHANIC

I diagnose, repair, and maintain industrial generators up to 320 kW for construction-site power distribution and panel tie-ins, across a fleet of roughly 70 units, in the shop and in the field. Schematics, wiring diagrams, and field testing get me to no-start, overheating, relay, and false-shutdown faults — usually with limited documentation to work from.

Where most shops replace a whole assembly, I repair the subcomponent. When the part doesn't exist any more, I design a replacement in SolidWorks and make it however the job needs — most often printed, machined or fabricated when that suits it better: cable connectors, strain reliefs, magnetic pickups, breaker-box hardware, and distribution-panel parts. Fourteen of those are production parts the shop now runs on.

REPRESENTATIVE RESULT

A printed connector and strain-relief design brought 30+ damaged cables back into service — parts that run about $150 a pair from the OEM — and now supports a shop inventory of 300+ cables.

AT ASU

Formula SAE and Rocketry

Two teams take most of my time outside class. Coursework is the foundation, but this is where I get to design something, build it, and then find out how wrong I was.

Formula SAE — Sun Devil Motorsports

SINCE AUG 2025

On the engine and manufacturing team — maintaining and working on the car's powerplant. I also design and fabricate chassis-mounted components for a tightly packaged student-built car: the PDM plate, ignitor plate, and E-kill switch plate, all with released drawings, and a PA12-CF10 radiator fan shroud. Reoriented the PDM mounting plate so its cooling fins face oncoming airflow, improving cooling, wire routing, and serviceability without giving up structural strength. I also built a waterjet-cut aluminum clutch-basket holding tool, which proved useful enough that the team bought it, and machined aluminum fixtures for buckling tests on aluminum-to-carbon-fiber tubes. Also support traction-control integration and analyze ECU logs for torque management.

Researched, designed, and produced the 2027 car's oil and coolant catch cans — a rules-driven 1.0 L design, with the oil can printed in PAHT-CF and the coolant can welded up from 5052 aluminum.

Sun Devil Rocketry — Advanced High Power

SINCE NOV 2025

TEST OFFICER

OpenRocket modeling turned into CAD, fiberglass and carbon-fiber fin cans and body tubes, and design work on nose cones, the avionics-bay structure, and camera mounts — sized to fit within rocket diameter constraints while protecting onboard electronics from vibration. The test-officer side is black-powder deployment testing: e-matches, continuity checks, and recovery and payload integration.

Developing preliminary payload designs for the team's 2027 NASA Student Launch entry.

ALSO ON

MATE ROV — Underwater Robotics

SINCE FEB 2026

Assembly, soldering, and continuity work on the SeaMATE Eagle Ray controller and an Arduino Mega 2560, plus ongoing development of the manipulator arm.

BEFORE ENGINEERING

Leadership, first

I came to engineering through a military track, and it shaped how I work more than any single class has — take ownership, be accurate about what you know, and make the people around you better.

2023 — 2024

Platoon Sergeant

U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY PREP SCHOOL · WEST POINT, NY

Completed July 2024, finishing 43rd of 206. Led training, accountability, and peer mentorship for 40 soldiers.

2021 — 2023

Cadet Company Commander

MARINE MILITARY ACADEMY · HARLINGEN, TX

Led and mentored 60 cadets, and worked to shift company leadership from a fear-based model to servant leadership. The unit finished first in military and physical performance — four consecutive Golden Guidon wins. Received the Colonel H. William Card Jr. Leadership Award.

TOOLS

What I work with

DESIGN & ANALYSIS

  • SolidWorks
  • Sheet metal + DXF flat patterns
  • ANSYS
  • CFD (SolidWorks Flow Simulation)
  • LTSpice circuit simulation
  • Guidance, navigation & control (GNC)
  • OpenRocket
  • Design for manufacturing

MANUFACTURING

  • CNC and manual mill, lathe
  • MIG / TIG welding
  • CNC machining + Fusion 360 CAM
  • Brake-formed sheet metal
  • Laser and waterjet cutting
  • Composites — fiberglass and carbon fiber
  • 3D printing — broad material range, commodity through carbon-filled nylon
  • 3D scanning + mesh cleanup
  • Fiberglass fabrication
  • Test & validation

PROGRAMMING

  • Python
  • C++
  • MATLAB
  • Linux
  • Git

EMBEDDED & ELECTRICAL

  • Arduino · Raspberry Pi · Teensy · ESP32
  • ARM Cortex-M
  • PCB design (Altium)
  • BLDC / FOC motor control
  • SPI · I2C · UART · CAN
  • Wiring, schematics, and control circuits
  • Diagnostics & fault isolation
  • LiDAR, GPS, IMU, camera integration
  • DC-DC power distribution
  • PCLink · telemetry

Want to see the work?

The portfolio has the personal projects — UAVs, robotics, and embedded systems. Services covers the parts I design and build for clients.

PORTFOLIO →SERVICES →GET IN TOUCH →RESUME (PDF) ↓