TIA PIGNETTI ’27

Soaring into Senior Year

Tia Pignetti ’27 Utilizes Her RPI Experiences at Boeing and Beyond 

When Tia Pignetti ’27 accepted a summer 2026 internship with Boeing, she knew it would be an adventure. After all, she’d be leaving the Hudson Valley to travel 2,800 miles to Long Beach, California, and dive into the world of a Fortune 500 company.

Yet Tia never imagined the unexpected highlights and moments of personal discovery along the way. From driving across the country with her dad and experiencing the breathtaking beauty of the Rocky Mountains, to attending a World Cup watch party on the streets of Long Beach, and to spontaneously rock climbing for the first time, Tia’s West Coast adventure has already shaped her as a person and an engineer.

Her internship at Boeing has transformed her view of the corporate environment and what engineering can look like in practice. For example, Tia has discovered entirely new specialties within the field, such as her focus this summer on ensuring compliance with FAA guidelines as part of the aircraft certification process.

Moreover, Tia admits that she was initially stunned by the sheer size of Boeing after seeing the scale of workers on just one floor at just one facility. In building connections within her team and the wider company, she began to understand the infinite opportunities for career growth and diversification within a global aerospace company.

This realization was prompted, in large part, to the network of alumni eager to support her internship journey. Her mentor at Boeing this summer is an RPI alumnus. Tia shared, “She pointed me in the direction of all the other RPI graduates, and then those RPI graduates pointed me in the direction of other people. Now I have a network of RPI alumni and RPI-adjacent colleagues supporting my interests. There is an incredible sense of community here.”

In fact, RPI has served as a launching pad for Tia’s defining internship experience since her first semester on campus. As a double major in aeronautical engineering and mechanical engineering, Tia quickly became involved in the Design, Build, Fly (DBF) club. Her dedication to her manufacturing role assembling airplane prototypes earned her a trip to Kansas for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Design Build Fly competition as a freshman.

She was elected president of the club as a sophomore, serving in a leadership role that included securing funding and budgeting resources. That year culminated with a trip to Tucson, Arizona, where the club earned fifth place among 109 teams in the AIAA Design Build Fly student competition, as well as the highest combined flight score in RPI DBF history.

Tia has also built her leadership skills through two jobs: supporting building operations at the Mueller Center and the Student Union as a student coordinator, and serving as a resident assistant, most recently with the freshman in Barton Hall. These positions have helped make her time at RPI financially possible – and so have scholarships, including her endowed Paula Loring Simon ’68 Scholarship. Tia shared, “The financial support from RPI has taken a weight off my whole family’s shoulders” and substantially reduced the stress of earning a degree.

Thanks to this support, Tia has been able to focus instead on making the most of her RPI experience, including discovering her passion for propulsions and aircraft stress analysis through her courses in the School of Engineering. Looking to the future, these are two areas she may focus on as her promising career takes off. For now, her goal is to simply enjoy her senior year at RPI and start saying “yes” to the opportunities that come her way. If there’s anything Tia has learned in California this summer, it’s to embrace spontaneity and prioritize new experiences. It’s a powerful mindset that has shaped her summer for the better — and promises to elevate her opportunities as she graduates from RPI in spring 2027.