MONACA, Pa. — Walt Everetts may not have been the guy one would have expected to become an aerospace engineer when he started his education at Penn State Beaver in the early 1980s. In fact, he said, there was a point where it appeared unlikely that he would graduate at all.
Fast forward to 2025. Everetts is not only retired from what turned out to be a fascinating and distinguished career; he also is Penn State Beaver’s spring 2025 commencement speaker.
But it wasn’t always an easy path from his start at Penn State Beaver to where he is today.
A rocky start
Everetts grew up in Brighton Township, the son of a US Airways mechanic and a teacher. He graduated from Beaver Area High School.
“I was not a stellar student by any means,” Everetts said. But, he said, he knew he wanted to be an engineer, and he needed to go to college. Aerospace appealed to him, in part because his father was part of the aviation industry and the space business was, in reality, just getting established.
Things did not go smoothly. At the end of his first year at the Beaver campus, he said, he ended up homeless. He spent the next year living first in a friend’s house, then in an attic and sometimes in a tent.
“Everything I owned and needed — including my textbooks, tent and sleeping bag — fit on the back of my motorcycle,” Everetts said.
Unable to pay for the most basic necessities, he said, he was placed on probation by the University for leaving the cafeteria without paying.
After completing two years at Beaver, he decided he wanted to take summer classes at University Park. He found a place to live and planned to head to State College at the end of the spring semester.
Before he could make it to State College, he got in trouble again for drinking in a friend’s dorm room on his last day of finals at Penn State Beaver. However, because he had plans to attend classes in the summer, he was given another chance.
Once he was in State College, Everetts was hanging out with a group of people who had marijuana. The police showed up and asked everyone to empty their pockets.
Everetts thought nothing of it. He didn’t have anything he shouldn’t have … or so he thought. The police asked him about a key in his pocket that said it was the property of Penn State. Everetts explained it belonged to the dorms at the Beaver campus; his friends had given it to him to allow him to have access to the showers.
The police charged him with having stolen property, and the adage, “Three strikes and you’re out,” became true for Everetts. He was expelled from Penn State.
‘He’s a survivor’
For many people that would have been the end of their college journey. But not for Everetts.
He was notified before the start of the fall semester that year that he could submit a letter of reinstatement to the University.
His girlfriend at the time, Maria — today his wife of 38 years — helped him write the letter. He drove his motorcycle from Beaver County to University Park through the night so he could be on the doorstep of the College of Engineering at 8 a.m. to hand-deliver it in the nick of time — and he was again back in school.
“My junior year was the hardest year of my life,” Everetts said. Not only were his aerospace engineering classes grueling, he said, but he was still broke. He was back to scraping by, and getting into scrapes.
Maria uses the word “resilient” to describe her husband.
“He’s a survivor,” Maria said, “He knows how to take a bad situation and make the most of it. He had a foundation of grit and determination, a strong circle of friends to support him and a drive to finish the dream of becoming an aerospace engineer.”
In August of 1984, Everetts graduated from Penn State with a degree in aerospace engineering.
“I survived. I made it,” he said — but the stress and strain took a toll.
“I was done with college. I was burned out,” he said. “I loved the University, the atmosphere and what I learned. But being homeless and dirt-poor took its toll. Quite honestly, I was tired of ramen noodles, hot dogs, all-nighters and tests for a while.”
‘I better do something’
Everetts took a year off and drove a truck in the Pittsburgh area for an auto parts company. He and Maria took a break as well.
After a year, Everetts said he decided he had better do something. He sent his resume to RCA, which would eventually become Lockheed Martin, and got a job in New Jersey as an aerospace engineer building satellites. He and Maria got back together, got married and had two boys, Andrew and Nicholas.
He loved his new job, Everetts said.
“It was the most fun you could possibly have and it utilized the education I gained from Penn State, plus my natural ability to design things and solve complex problems,” Everetts said. “I just loved it.”
He was building, testing and launching satellites. He was learning from teammates — “old crochety guys” — who had a lot more experience.
Everetts and his wife, who became a math teacher, decided they wanted to leave New Jersey after 10 years to go somewhere warm. In 1995 the family landed in Arizona when Everetts was offered a job after sending an unsolicited resume to Motorola. Motorola was building a system called Iridium and were starting something that had never been attempted before — mass production of satellites.
“We accomplished what I first thought impossible — building satellites with a production line approach using design for manufacturability and design for testability as cornerstones,” Everetts said.
Time for a change
Though he loved what he was doing, Everetts said, he wanted to see what else he could do. He was interested in the field of terrestrial communications, which lead him to spend the next eight years traveling all over the world installing telecommunication systems: Wi-Fi, WiMAX, CDMA, GSM, video, any system that needed an experienced program manager for a new concept or location.
The lure of aerospace was always deep inside during those eight years, and in late 2007 he accepted a position working for Iridium LLC, a leading provider of global voice and data satellite communications. The same system he built in the late 1990s was now in need of someone to manage operations and execute the efforts to launch a replacement constellation.
By the time he retired in 2023, Everetts was the vice president of Space and Ground Services at Iridium. He had also gone full circle back to supporting Penn State as an adviser to the Aerospace Engineering Department as part of their Industrial and Professional Advisory Council.
In 2024, he was named an Outstanding Engineering Alumni by the Penn State College of Engineering.
Everetts continues to be involved with and support Penn State — he said he believes in the value of educationand the importance of teachers and wants to support students.
Everetts will share his thoughts and advice with Penn State Beaver graduates at the spring graduation ceremony at 4 p.m. May 9 in the Beaver Fieldhouse.