Ferndale Alum Competes in Shanghai, Heading to Cyprus

In 2006, 's robotics team was facing extinction. FHS student Katy Olesnavage appealed to the Ferndale PTSA, asking for $500 to keep the team going. From that, the Ferndale parents and the community recognized the passion Olesnavage and her friends had for the club and the importance of it.

The club was saved, and it put Olesnavage on a path to Shanghai.

Olesnavage graduated from FHS in 2007. This year, she's a senior at MIT — yeah, that MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — and she's competed in the 2010 International Design Contest in Shanghai.

Olesnavage credits two years of robotics team competition at Ferndale with sparking her interest in engineering. Ferndale allowed her to dual enroll at Lawrence Technological University in her junior and senior years, which kept her academically engaged with math and science at an elevated level, she said.

“If FHS hadn’t given me the opportunity to (dual enroll), I think I would have lost interest in science and math a long time ago,” she said. “Without (those teachers and parents), I really don't know what I'd be doing with my life.”

She singled out Gayle Minneci, her counselor at Ferndale, mathematics teacher Tom Maes and Robert Korson for helping her along the way.

“I had the pleasure of having her in my class,” Maes said. “When we started the robotics team, she really sparked.”

Olesnavage became the electronics expert. “She applied the information she was learning in her math and science classes to the robots," Maes added. "If we needed something soldered, she did it and took ownership of it.”

After high school graduation, Olesnavage went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for two years. For her junior year, she transferred to MIT in Cambridge, MA, majoring in mechanical engineering with a minor in Spanish.

She said that through her schooling, she's had the opportunity to take unique classes and has encountered amazing teachers and uncovered several opportunities.

One of those opportunities was her Shanghai experience.

Last year, Olesnavage was selected to participate in an International Design Contest (IDC) called Robocon hosted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

Prior to going, her Design and Manufacturing class spent an entire semester designing and building robots. She was among six of those students who were picked by the instructors to go to Shanghai. There she work with and competed against students from France, Brazil, China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Singapore.

“We were broken up into teams of five with students from other countries so that we weren't working with anyone else from our own country,” she said. Each team designed and built two robots.

The last day of the competition took place at the World Expo in Shanghai. "It was a lot of work, but it was an amazing experience,” said Olesnavage. The students spent about 10 hours working in the machine shop every day and played soccer every night on a field between their two hotels.

“I still talk to some of the students we met there almost every week,” she said.

Olesnavage will head to Cyprus for a month this summer to complete her undergraduate thesis.

“One of the aquifers where they get a lot of their fresh water is seeping out into the ocean, so my adviser is sending me over there with a boat and lots of sensors to see if I can figure out where it’s leaking," she said.

After that, she plans to go to graduate school, focusing on assisting developing countries.  

Olesnavage said there is something about a Ferndale education that encourages a global view and taking action on behalf of people who need help. She cites several friends from FHS who have studied abroad or worked with people living below the poverty line.

“I think that’s something that Ferndale offers that a lot of the private schools in the area don't," she said.