Engineering the Future: Senior Jack Zickefoose interns at engineering firm Burns & McDonnell and hopes to go into an engineering field in college and beyond

While most East students walk the crowded hallways to their 5th or 6th hour class, senior Jack Zickefoose walks out into the East parking lot, gets in his car and drives 10 minutes south to his internship at engineering firm Burns & McDonnell.

Zickefoose has been working as an intern at Burns & McDonnell since June, handling smaller assignments given to him by managers and other engineers. A typical day can include anything from working with coding softwares to managing fiber optic cables, which are used for long-distance networking between the KC branch of Burns & McDonnell and their Denver branch.

“Basically, I just sort of manage some of the easier jobs in ‘The Lab’ that don’t [require] a degree,” Zickefoose said.

The Lab is a room where engineers at Burns & McDonnell use various ethernet machines and software, most of which are donated to test new technology that engineers are working on.

Zickefoose’s internship at Burns & McDonnell is incredibly exclusive — only him and one other Shawnee Mission student were accepted. Students must go through interviews with Burns & McDonnell in order to even be considered for the internship, according to East engineering teacher Vincent Miller.

“Burns & McDonnell opens up their internships to the Shawnee Mission School District,” Miller said. “So they all have to interview for it, and [Jack] was lucky enough to get in.”

Since Zickefoose plans to go into engineering after college, getting the internship massively boosts his chances.

Before he got the internship, Zickefoose was one of roughly 75 students who took Aerospace Engineering at the Center for Academic Achievement.

“Jack is very quiet in the classroom,” Aerospace Engineering instructor Jessica Tickle said. “But he’s really good at taking in information and then applying it to what he’s working on.”

One of the things that students build in Aerospace Engineering is a functioning rocket. 

According to Zickefoose, the process started with the students designing the software for the rockets before printing out blueprints, assembling the necessary materials and then putting them all together to make it fly. This project pushed him to pursue engineering beyond regular classes.

“Jack’s really curious,” Cusimano said. “He’s always trying to figure out more about what he’s working on whether that’s what he’s working on in The Lab.”

Before he was in Aerospace Engineering, Zickefoose took the engineering classes at East, which cover a far broader and more basic range of engineering fields, as compared to CAA classes which focus on one specific thing like biotechnology or animation.

Zickefoose’s work doesn’t stop when he gets home either. He spends his free time tinkering with anything from Xbox controllers to an old iPad, mostly by meticulously picking them apart and then creating new things from them.

“I’d say it’s actually more taking stuff apart than building stuff,” Zickefoose said. “Sometimes I’ll fashion something random into something to mess around with, like that’s how I made a laser pointer out of Xbox controller parts once.”

But Zickefoose doesn’t just work on only physical things, he learned how to code over the summer as it was required for the internship. Now, he can use and understand the various ethernet machines in The Lab.

He learned how to use programs like ChatGPT and PuTTY to understand the code behind the machines.

“I had to learn how to use the code in the machines and then convert into other format,” Zickefoose said. “Basically just to show what that machine does.”

After high school he plans to major in engineering at the University of Kansas where he will focus on mechanical engineering.

“I’m not just following other people’s footsteps.” Zickefoose said.“I get to go out and do my own stuff and put my own footprint on the Earth.”