Spencer Leach: Engineering crosswords

My name is Spencer Leach. I am a mechanical engineering student here at VT, and I just had my fourth crossword published in the New York Times. My parents got me into crosswords. They would always try to involve me in the Sunday puzzle whenever there was some sort of Pokemon or video game clue. And then I got really into it, my freshman year. I would be solving a lot. And then shortly after that, I saw that, you know, they were open submission, and could anyone could submit one. And I got a lot of rejections. I submit I tried over and over, slowly got better, and eventually I got my first acceptance in November of my sophomore year here. I don't know. Engineering is such such a broad field of problem solving at its heart, I think, and it's even if you're not making robots or cars or what you think engineers do, it's really, just being in an engineering program teaches you how to think how to approach problems like this from maybe a more computational standpoint, rather than the normal crossword method of thinking of examples. So a couple of years ago, a Sunday puzzle ran and the blurb was, it ended with, "this person is currently looking for a summer internship and welcomes any potential employers to reach out." And I reached out to, his name is Joel Fagliano at the New York Times, and I was like, "Hey, I saw this awesome interview or this blurb you wrote for this guy, he said he had gotten interviews from it." I was like, Hey, maybe we can turn this into not a resume, but say, Hey, I'm looking for internships and he really really did me a solid. I owe it to him if I get an internship for sure. I guess one thing I really like about crosswords is that you're doing your own thing, but at the same time, the end goal is to really just provide fun to as many people as possible. If I can just put my skill set into helping other people, I would consider that a huge win.