When University of Virginia engineering students posted a
YouTube video last spring of a plastic turbofan engine they had designed and
built using 3-D printing technology, they didn’t expect it to lead to anything
except some page views.
But executives at The MITRE Corporation, a McLean-based
federally funded research and development center with an office in
Charlottesville, saw the video and sent an announcement to the School of
Engineering and Applied Science that they were looking for two summer interns
to work on a new project involving 3-D printing. They just didn’t say what the
project was.
Only one student responded to the job announcement: Steven
Easter, then a third-year mechanical engineering major.