Tiffany Ascanio

Tiffany Ascanio started her undergraduate career in 2009 at the University of Florida. She had the potential to succeed, but several life-altering incidents changed that – a major accident, family conflicts, and a series of medical issues.

By 2011, she had quit school and moved to North Carolina. There, she started hiking, building aquarium systems, and eventually redeveloped a passion for engineering.

Tiffany moved back to Florida and went through service dog certification training with Kali - her medical alert dog. In Spring 2015, she transferred to FIU to study environmental engineering. After attending her first Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) conference, she changed her degree to mechanical engineering and became an executive board member for SHPE. 

With Kali’s support, things started to turn for Tiffany. She received awards and scholarships, including being named a NACME scholar. Internships with GE Appliances and Boeing followed. At GE Appliances, she completed a technology co-op rotation, spending four months developing an interactive library to showcase craftsmanship design standards for the company. At Boeing, she worked as a systems integration engineer, documenting incidents that happened across commercial fleets, determining their root cause and implementing corrective solutions.

Tiffany’s hard work and perseverance paid off. She has been hired by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in Seattle as a manufacturing engineer. She will be working on the automation process of the electronic wiring in Boeing's 737 aircrafts. And Kali will be joining her!

By Millie Acebal
Senior Account Manager, College of Engineering & Computing