Orion DeYoe: Degree Not Required

Orion DeYoe: Degree Not Required

Engineer, CEO, educator, volunteer, video game designer, programmer. These are just a few of the titles that STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) enthusiast Orion DeYoe holds. Orion is a passionate individual who pours himself and his engineering knowledge into the kids in his community, and instills a love for STEM into each one of them. He has been designing, creating, and building for longer than he can remember, and nothing stands in the way of him achieving his goals.

When Orion was a young kid, his dad practiced flight simulation in an early computer program, and Orion was fascinated by its mechanics and design. He would stand over his father’s shoulder, enamored with learning how everything worked.

“All kids love airplanes. I would watch him work and then go into the program to create 3D models of the airplanes. That’s probably when my love for CAD started.”

This early experience with 3D design afforded him invaluable spatial reasoning skills that served him well when he joined the FIRST Robotics Competition team, 2252 The Mavericks. FIRST is a worldwide non-profit organization that provides competitive robotics teams for students ages 5-18. Orion credits FIRST as the biggest influence in his life as he pursued his career in STEM. It was through his experience on a FIRST team that he got his first engineering internship when he was only 16. Recognizing his talents and passion for the work, the same company offered Orion a full time position as an engineer as soon as he completed high school.

“My mentor on The Mavericks, Alex Yeckley, made me want to pursue STEM professionally. He always took the time to explain the little details to me, and was the best example of what makes a good engineer. I credit him for my success in FIRST and at my first engineering job."

A STEM Legacy

After Orion graduated high school and left The Mavericks, he knew he wanted to give other kids the opportunity to experience a full hands-on STEM education the same way he did. To him, this kind of education is a right, not a privilege, and he believes it is vital to the development of any young student, not just the ones who end up pursuing a career in a STEM field.

“There is nothing wrong with wanting to pursue a STEM career, giving it a try, and then realizing you want to go in a different direction. This is why hands-on STEM education at an early age is so important.”

It was because of this belief that Orion founded Stellar Robotics, a FIRST organization in Richland County that hosts robotics teams at all age levels and provides active hands-on learning experiences for kids and teenagers in this community. Orion has now been on the board of directors for Stellar Robotics since 2014, and the organization has become the center of STEM education in Richland County.

“FIRST had such a big impact on me as a student that I wanted to keep doing it even after I graduated. I wanted to make the knowledge I gained available to other students, but I also wanted to make the program itself accessible to students who didn’t have anything else like it available to them. Starting Stellar and seeing the impact it is having on young kids has been a really rewarding experience.”

As someone who directly oversees robot design within the FIRST community, Orion saw a gap in the products being offered to teams for various components of their robots. They were too expensive, inefficient, or just not well designed. Orion sought to fill this gap in the founding of his own company, Competition Robot Parts (or CRP.) Orion designs, manufactures, and sells parts designed specifically for FIRST robotics teams, at a fraction of the cost most of his competitors offer. Several of the larger companies in this niche area have begun to mimic Orion’s designs for their own production because he has been so successful. Orion considers CRP to be his biggest success in regards to STEM.

“I am able to design products that meet the needs of the market, sell them, make a profit, and iterate on those designs to come out with new products that improve on the old ones. The engineering that goes into that, combined with the manufacturing knowledge I have gained from it, definitely makes my small business my biggest success in regards to STEM.”

Award Winning Leader

Orion’s presence as a mentor and leader for students passionate about STEM has effected positive change in Richland County for the sake of STEM education. He impresses the importance of experiencing STEM firsthand and hands-on on not just his students, but the community as well. There has been a rise in STEM programs and camps in local public schools since Orion’s Stellar Robotics organization joined the scene.

Orion has been singled out by the FIRST organization as an ideal role model for STEM students and one of the best team mentors in our tri-state region. He was awarded the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award which recognizes an exceptional leader and mentor within the FIRST organization. This is one of the highest honors given to an individual within FIRST, and at just 21 years old at the time of being presented with the award, Orion is one of the youngest mentors ever in FIRST’s history to be awarded this honor.

When asked what advice he had for high school students who wanted to pursue STEM like himself, he said,

“Find a robotics program. Join the robotics program. It’s the only program that’s multidisciplinary enough for you to dip your toes into all areas of engineering and actually work the way you would work if you were in a real engineering job. If you don’t like it, that’s okay. But you need to try it.”

This is exactly what Orion did, and it couldn’t have worked more in his favor.

Recipe for Success

Passionate, intelligent, and driven to no end, it seems as though every project Orion touches turns to gold. He is successful in every endeavor he takes on, and his years of experience provides him with a unique advantage in his career as someone who has learned exclusively through hands-on education. At only 24 years old, Orion has already spent almost ten years working in the engineering field, something most people cannot claim until they are in their thirties. For this, Orion actually has his lack of a college degree to thank.

As someone who learned at an early age that hands-on education is the best kind of education, Orion made the bold choice upon graduating high school to not pursue his college degree. In a society that treats degrees as the end-all, be-all of education, many around Orion doubted this choice and told him he would need the degree to succeed in the STEM field. Orion recognizes that our time has value however, and he stuck by his decision to remain in the workforce instead of going to college full time.

“When I graduated high school and turned my internship into a full time job, I was actually doing online classes for college. But with the amount of time it takes to have a full time engineering job, I had to let something go. Since I was already doing what I wanted to do as a job, it just didn’t make sense to me to pursue a degree instead.”

Some might say that Orion is successful despite his lack of a degree. But rather than spend 4+ years in a classroom, Orion chose to get his hands dirty and get to work. Between the full time engineering job he had at only 18, starting his own manufacturing company, building a hands-on STEM education organization from the ground up in Richland County, and constantly pursuing new projects in the world of engineering and technology, Orion has amassed enough knowledge to fill several college degrees.

Between in-depth studies on the country’s best colleges, profiles on the world’s richest and most successful people, and a desperate need to measure up to expectations of others, our society is constantly searching for the “recipe for success.” Orion has clearly found it. Through passion, dedication, and pure hard work, Orion has proven that success is attainable for everyone... degree not required.

“My goal is to work in a field where I can move the state of the art of that field forward. There are so many fields I could pursue in that way, all of them I’m passionate about. I want to contribute to the advancement of engineering, accomplish things that have never been done before, and move the field forward into new technology, new terrains.”