Anna Haskins ’25: Engineering a Career with Honda

A double major in mechanical and textile engineering: if you haven’t heard of that path before, it’s because Anna Haskins is the first student at NC State to take it. 

“I always thought the fiber industry was very interesting, so that’s what led me to textile engineering,” she says. “Then, during sophomore year,  we took a class that did a lot of 3D modeling, and that convinced me to add the mechanical engineering major.”

And since NC State is the only university in the U.S. to offer an accredited bachelor’s degree in textile engineering, she’ll join a select few engineers with expertise in both areas. Despite this, she’s found a natural overlap between the two disciplines, whether it’s knitting prototypes for her capstone Senior Design project, applying Lean Six Sigma principles or researching with the Nano Mechanics Lab. 

“I was actually researching heat conductive fabrics,” she says. “I worked on a lot of what you could call embroidery designs, thinking of how to attach these silver nano wires to the fabric to give it heating capability.”

Her textile engineering degree has taken her all over Europe. In France, she spent a summer abroad learning about leather tanning and the chemistry behind cosmetics. Then, she traveled to Milan, Italy, for the international conference ITMA, where she explored all things textile manufacturing. 

“That experience was really cool: to see all those vendors and travel with college and attend that conference. I got to see a lot of cool dyeing processes and machinery at work,” she says. “My big goal for that trip was to eat gelato every day, and I did.”

A drive to become more familiar with all sorts of engineers motivated her to join NC State’s chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), where she eventually served as the vice president of company relations. 

“It was really a lot of working with companies and inviting them to different events we were hosting. It was great to see that people are getting internships from the companies that I’m inviting,” she says. “But also, SWE hosts a national conference – this past year it was in Chicago – and that’s where I got my job with Honda.” 

Tell us more about your upcoming job with Honda! 

I’ll be an upper body design engineer for Honda in Columbus, Ohio. So I will be doing the first step of car production, which is the frame. I guess you could say I’ll be working on the most structural part of the car. If a car accident were to happen, the frame would be bearing the brunt of the impact.

My job is to try to make the more conceptual design team’s ideas come to life in the safest way possible for the consumer.  Part of that will be using a virtual reality headset to help with the 3D modeling of the car. The team I’m on is really responsible for the shape of the car. 

I think everything I learned from my Excel/VBA and Lean Six Sigma classes from Wilson will definitely come into play in this job. Plus, my understanding of the manufacturing industry, because we take two core textile manufacturing classes where we learn about how to in terms of how to reduce waste and minimize impact on the materials we’re using. So I do think textiles will still have a very important role in my future. 

How has your time in the College of Engineering’s Ambassador Program impacted you? 

I wanted to be a part of it because it was advertised as this prestigious leadership program. What made me stick with it, though, was it’s really rewarding to me to work with prospective and first-year students. My favorite thing I do as part of the program is being a teaching assistant for the first-year engineering students. 

I still am in cahoots with a lot of my past students, so it’s really rewarding to see them tell me when they got their first internship.

And also, just the great people. I met a lot of my closest friends through the program.

What have your favorite classes been? 

My favorite one with Textiles has to be fiber science. I think it is so cool learning about the different fibers and understanding why a cotton-poly blend might not be the most beneficial, things like that. And then I also loved my thermodynamics class. That was such a good class where something just clicked for me. I took that with mechanical, but it’s something that’s offered to textile engineering students, too.

What advice would you give your first-year self? 

I would tell her to try everything. My first year, I was very anxious about trying new clubs and trying new things in general. I would say do anything to put yourself out there; make yourself known.