Chemical engineering student receives scholarship from Automotive Women’s Alliance Foundation

Sally Raudabaugh, a chemical engineering major, has been awarded a scholarship from the Automotive Women’s Alliance Foundation (AWAF). Raudabaugh, a Columbus native, will receive $2,500 from the scholarship, sponsored by Faurecia.

Scholarships are selected by the AWAF Scholarship Committee and awarded quarterly to women who exhibit a passion and drive for the automotive industry. Recipients must be accepted to or enrolled in an accredited collegiate program, with a 3.0 or higher GPA.

Now in her fourth year of study, Raudabaugh has interned at three different well-known companies since 2014, gaining valuable experiences in process control engineering, manufacturing design and facilities engineering. She has completed internships at Anomatic, Apple and most recently, Tesla, where she was challenged to improve the Tesla Giga factory's building air supply systems. She built a maintenance management system from scratch for technicians to receive work orders and track work being done on building appliances. The experience honed her communication skills through frequent presentations and technical writing, and gave her hands-on lessons with various software in maintenance management, computer-aided design, design of experiments, project management and industrial safety.

Raudabaugh urges women not to rule out a career in the automotive industry just because they don’t know much about cars.

“In the manufacturing environment of the auto industry, it is important to have facilities engineers to work on the systems that support manufacturing,” she said.