Outstanding Senior Samantha Montalbine Acquired Honors, Awards and Confidence
Samantha Montalbine '26 always knew that she liked engineering. She was team captain of her middle-school robotics team in Brooklyn, and at Freehold Township High School she took engineering classes and served as president of the Technology Students Association.
But when Montalbine applied to New Jersey Institute of Technology's Newark College of Engineering, she was uncertain about which engineering track would be the right one for her. She ended up choosing mechanical engineering for an unconventional reason.
"I Googled 'vaguest engineering major' and mechanical engineering came up," Montalbine says. "I tell people I got so lucky, because I started loving it as soon as I came to NJIT and started pursuing it."
Her choice paid off, and Montalbine quickly found plenty of opportunities to shine. She earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and is an Albert Dorman Honors Scholar with a 4.0 GPA and Dean’s List recognition. She has designed drones and robots for her courses, and during internships at Thorlabs and Valcor Engineering Corporation she developed prototypes and contributed to mechanical design and manufacturing. At NJIT's Newark College of Engineering's 28th Annual Salute to Engineering Excellence ceremony, held April 16 in Warren, NJ, she received two awards: the Outstanding Senior Award for the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, and NCE's overall standout senior award.
A Leader and Mentor
Throughout her academic career, Montalbine has been an active member of NJIT's student community. She volunteered for open houses serving the mechanical engineering department. As the human resources and event coordinator for NJIT’s Baja SAE Team, which builds off-road vehicles from scratch, Montalbine helped lead and mentor more than 80 students, while managing administrative tasks and organizing outreach initiatives. At Albert Dorman Honors College (ADHC), she was president of the Honors Hall Council from fall 2022 to spring 2024.
"I got to work with this great board of people," she says. "Our goal was to run events for the honors kids, make them feel welcomed and at home in the Honors College, and provide ways for them to make friends and have fun memories."
Additional work with alumni and donor relations, scholarships and annual giving teams fueled her interest in reaching beyond the campus to help bring new students to NJIT and nurture them on their journey.
"I work in any way I can to make sure that kids can come to the school, be happy and have as great an experience as I did," Montalbine says.
You got this
Montalbine's time at NJIT also taught her to believe in herself — a lesson she tries to share with other students.
"I used to be so shy," she recalls. "And then now, I see freshmen or sophomores who are as shy and nervous to be in this environment as I was, and I want to be the person that they can rely on in that safe space." At NJIT's annual scholarship brunch, she typically sits with someone who's attending for the first time and tries to put them at ease.
"They're so nervous, and I just try to tell them: 'You got this,' because I would want someone doing that for me."
As Montalbine's confidence in her own abilities grew, she found support in academic advisors from ADHC and the mechanical engineering department: Caitlin Kain and Faneza Hoossain-Ally, respectively.
"They are more than just advisors; I like to consider them my friends," she says. "I always feel welcome to schedule office hours with them, sit down and talk about life, ask for advice and hear how they're doing. I've never felt looked down on. It's been such a pleasure to have them as my advisors over the past four years."
For her final semester at NJIT, Montalbine returned to a whimsical robotics project that she first imagined as a freshman, inspired by M-O, the aggrieved cleaning robot in the movie Wall-E. Unlike the original M-O, Montalbine's robot is stationary. But it shares M-O's annoyance with dirt.
"He has sensors inside of him to react to a reimagining of dirt, and then he has different cycles of emotions that he'll go through," Montalbine says. "He'll eject his siren, have 'angry eyes,' and start rotating his spinner very rapidly."
Montalbine's "M-O" prototype, showing its "angry" face. Photo courtesy of Samantha Montalbine
Because of her early interest in robotics, Montalbine thought that building robots would be her focus at NJIT. But an internship that included work in fiber optics broadened her understanding of different aspects of robotics and their diverse applications. "That ended up bringing me to Valcor, the company I'm going to now, where I got to work in space and aircraft and nuclear and all these great fields that I never thought possible in middle school or high school."
Staying Connected
After graduation, Montalbine will join Valcor as a Level 1 Design Engineer — thanks to her two prior internships, she leapfrogged over the entry-level junior designer role. While her position is officially with the company's space department, "I'll be able to bounce between departments and help wherever they need it," she explains.
Though Montalbine is leaving NJIT, she isn't leaving it behind. Her first meeting with the Young Alumni Association takes place in June; she is also looking forward to participating in upcoming NJIT career fairs as a Valcor representative, and is working with one of her advisors to forge a path as an alumnus in the mechanical engineering department "so I can come back and help out," she says.
One day, she hopes to return to NJIT to further her education.
"I don't quite know yet what my specification will be, so I want to take a few years in the industry to figure that out before I come back."