A career launched on a train to Chicago

You could say Keegan Stewart’s love for advanced manufacturing started about a half-dozen years ago with a train ride to Chicago. Then a junior at Alexandria-Monroe High School, Keegan struck up a conversation with a fellow passenger who happened to work in robotics.

“It was very eye-opening,” said Keegan, who is now pursuing a graduate degree in engineering technology at Purdue University. “I did not stop asking him questions.”

Inspired by that chat, Keegan connected with Red Gold in Elwood, Indiana, during a high school career fair and learned that the tomato processing company not only offers high school internships but also would pay for his tuition if he worked there while going to college.

Keegan participated in the Red Gold internship from the summer of his junior year in high school through college graduation. Doing data entry and stocking shelves during his high school internship, he graduated to PLC programming, coding and other higher tech activities as he worked at Red Gold during the day and took college classes at Purdue Polytechnic Anderson.

He graduated with a degree in Mechatronics Engineering Technology in May 2022, got accepted to Purdue’s graduate program and just returned from a two-month study-abroad program in Germany, where he learned about European supply chain models and green energy technologies.

Now, he’s attending Purdue full time, studying Digital Industrial Management & Engineering, and expects to finish his graduate degree in 2024. But not before going to Germany once more. As part of his graduate degree, he will spend an additional semester studying in Germany, something he says he is very much looking forward to.

While Keegan points to that train-ride conversation as the spark that set him on his engineering path, he credits his experience working at Red Gold with helping him recognize his strengths and passions within engineering. The company allowed him to see and work in a number of areas, he said, and gave him increasing levels of responsibility. The company’s investment in him, he said, motivated him to exceed the company’s expectations.

At the same time, Keegan said the hands-on learning process employed at Purdue Polytechnic allowed him to more easily apply what he learned in the classroom to what he was doing on the job. And the combination of the two made the world of high-tech engineering come to life. He especially enjoyed working with a PID (proportional integral derivative) controller, he said, and the opportunity to experiment and solve problems on his own. Leaving Red Gold is bittersweet, Keegan said, but he looks forward to getting his graduate degree and applying his knowledge to the advanced manufacturing field.

While engineering is a passion for Keegan, it’s not his only passion. He also loves to teach. At this point, that desire is perhaps most obviously applied on the baseball field, where he coaches his little brothers alongside his dad, but he looks forward to one day teaching at a higher level.

“I want to be a professor,” he said. “I love helping people and I like helping people learn stuff. I think that’s my calling.”