Jumping Out of Airplanes Balances Academic Rigor for Suwanee Graduate

How do you graduate from Georgia Tech in four and a half years with a degree in biomedical engineering while coming up with a way to make breast cancer screenings better and less painful?

For Suwanee, Ga., native Rachael Blackstone, the answer is easy: make time for stress relief by jumping out of airplanes.

Blackstone decided to pursue sky diving one semester while contemplating her life’s goals. She was working at her co-op job that semester and took time to think about her “bucket list,” or what she would like to accomplish before she kicked the bucket.

“You don’t have to wait to start chipping away at your bucket list when you’re older, you can start now,” she said. “And on that bucket list I wanted to wing suit, but to wing suit, you have to have 200 sky dives. So I started jumping out of planes, got my certification, and I knew that we had the club here, and the club makes it so incredibly cheap in comparison to how it would be normally to jump out of airplanes. You get two free jumps a month with them.”

She rose to the position of senior vice president in the Sport Parachute Club at Georgia Tech and began participating with the team at intercollegiate competitions.

“It became my weekend hobby,” she said. “As long as there is good weather out, I’d rather be jumping out of planes than doing anything else.”

There’s also a biomedical engineering component to the sport that keeps her coming back. She likes the technical, physical challenges of sky diving. She said it’s not just falling out of an airplane.

“You’ve got to think about the body mechanics and the way the air is flowing past your body. You have control,” Blackstone said. “Your body is your mechanism of flight. Inputs like moving your arm down can cause you to turn or spin. By being able to put your body in different positions you cannot just fall belly to earth, but seated, standing, head down, or all sorts of other ways you can do it. It’s become a sport for me where I can constantly improve.”

When she wasn’t hurtling toward the earth at 120 miles per hour, Blackstone was being challenged by the No. 1 ranked biomedical engineering program in the country, according to the most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings. And her capstone project gave her the opportunity to work with a team to improve breast cancer screening technology.

Her grandmother’s own bout with breast cancer gave her extra motivation to arrive at a solution that didn’t involve the discomfort of compressing the breast between plates. Her team, “Next Breast Thing,” designed a new positioning plate for the Koning Breast CT scan machine. The goal was to make it more comfortable and reduce the skill and time required to position a patient.

“It’s the most common cancer among women,” Blackstone said. “Knowing that when your grandmother has breast cancer – so your mom or you are more likely to have it – it puts you at a higher risk factor. This is going to be not only more comfortable but also provide better imaging to find more of those tumors early on. Breast cancer is very survivable if you find it early on.”

Blackstone leaves Georgia Tech with a job in hand at GE Healthcare Operations Management Leadership Program. She will move to Wisconsin in February to begin her onboarding and training. She secured the job at the Career Fair early in fall semester, and securing the job removed a tremendous source of additional stress during her last semester.

“Honestly, I look back and wish there was more time in the day to do more,” Blackstone said. “I have so many great memories here, and there are so many ways I have grown in ways I didn’t expect. I’m so happy that I chose Georgia Tech.”