Engineering
Portland Magazine
Alumni
November 1, 2019
Ever since Juliana (Flores) Baza ’13 was three years old, she flew from Guam (where she is from) to Chicago to visit family, so she spent a lot of time on airplanes enthralled by flight and space and the mechanics and aspiration of it all. So she became a mechanical engineer at UP, and she got herself an internship with NASA during her junior year.
It was a dream come true, though the internship offered a somewhat surprising life lesson. NASA was an exercise in necessary but heavy regulations, caution, and slow decisionmaking, and she realized her personality was drawn to new ideas and nimble changes and solutions.
So she tried something entirely different. Her first job out of school was with a helmet company doing destruction testing. She stressed and broke bike helmets and took down the data to figure out ways to engineer better ones. Then Nike called and asked her to start destroying shoes—specifically their anti-clog soccer cleats.
“I went from airplanes to mud,” she says, and she had a blast.
Now, six years later, she is a product engineer with Nike, and she makes the shoes. She tests all the different materials and textiles, from the rubber soles to the pieces of metal near the lacings and everything else in between. She works on the newest versions of shoes up to 18 months in advance, and she is on the telephone with Nike’s factories in Asia nearly every day. So far she has visited the factories in Taiwan, Vietnam, and China twice—and she always makes sure to squeeze in a visit with her family in Guam on the way home.
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