Dawson Lang

Hi! My name is Dawson Lang, and I am a math and science teacher at Jefferson Academy Secondary School. I graduated from Mines in the spring of 2022 with a B.S. in Engineering Physics and a minor in Teaching. I will start my first year of teaching in the fall of 2022 by teaching 8th-grade math, Algebra I, and an engineering course at the high school level. Alongside teaching, I am also the assistant coach for the softball team, which will have its first season this year. I also hope to coach some more sports at the high school level later in my teaching career. 

Through Teach@Mines, I was able to get the Noyce scholarship which opened several opportunities for me as an educator and a researcher. This is the third year I will work with the STAR program through California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo. This program allowed me to work with several different research experiences with the University of California Santa Cruz, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Within these other projects, I was able to work on an astrophysics project and an app development project. I am currently working on a project with the deicing of aircraft and the weather conditions these aircraft fly in. It was great to get all these different research opportunities and bring this into the classroom. 

I was also the first to get a Teach@Mines minor at Mines. It was a fantastic experience taking all the classes through Mines to prepare for teaching. The support from Teach@Mines advisors Wendy Adams, Allie Bolter, and Kristine Callan truly helped me choose a career in education. I was also a member and the Teacher’s Education Alliance president as an undergraduate. I highly recommend participating in this club if you are interested in Teaching. Again, it was great to get support from my Teach@Mines advisors, but I built terrific relationships and received a lot of help from my peers in the TEA club.  

I feel that education has the benefits of feeling you are making a change in someone else’s life, and because of the support of Teach@Mines, I can make a fundamental change in the world every day.