Student Snapshot Katie Sherer-Taylor: Right on the dot
For most Ohio State students, the chance to participate in one of the greatest college football traditions in the country is slim to none. For Katie Sherer-Taylor, it was just a matter of time.
“I started playing sousaphone to be in the marching band and dot the ‘i,’” says Sherer-Taylor, a fifth-year materials science and engineering student. This September, she was the lucky band member who had the privilege to dot the “i” for the Ohio State vs. Troy game. “It was oneof those things that’s hard to put into words. It’s hard to remember the little details. You’ve worked for four years to get to that spot.”
Sherer-Taylor had two weeks to prepare to dot the “i,” since the previous week’s game was away, but the night before and morning of the Troy game were still like any other football weekend.
“The sousaphone has to be shined the night before every game,” she says, adding that game morning routines include donuts and rehearsal.
Choosing to play the sousaphone might have been an easy decision, but when it came to selecting a major, the stakes were a little higher.
“My sister was already studying materials science and engineering when I was looking at colleges,” she says, “but I also liked the mix of chemistry and physics.”
Coming to Ohio State seemed to be a much easier pick.
“A lot of it was the band,” she explains, “but it didn’t hurt that they had a good engineering program.”
Sherer-Taylor has been taking advantage of both aspects while on campus. Besides being a member of the marching band, she applied her engineering experiences at Ohio State in internships with Diamond Innovations and Quaker Oats and two internships with CC Technologies. She also received the Women in Engineering Outstanding Academic Award sponsored by Northrup Grumman.
“The internship with Quaker Oats wasn’t as engineering-related as the other ones,” Sherer-Taylor explains, “but it was probably the most interesting. I got to see the entire production line.”
On top of her internships, she also found time to be a teaching assistant in the Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors program, a series geared for first-year students.
“When I went through it as a first-year, I really enjoyed it,” Sherer-Taylor adds. “I saw what a good springboard it was. It’s interesting to go through the program as a freshman and then go through it again as an assistant with the knowledge you have from classes since then.”
