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Environmental Health and Safety Engineer, Delta
“It was such a fascinating time to not only be a student studying public health, but to also be interning in the airline industry at a time when travel and connection came to a halt,” says Hilsee. My manager was also a Rollins graduate, so he definitely knew the skills I was able to bring to the table as a student.”
Samantha Hilsee, an environmental health and safety engineer with Delta Flight Products, racked up three degrees and propelled down the runway toward a dream career at Delta during her five years at Emory. As a 4+1 student at Emory College and Rollins, Hilsee was able to merge her interests, hone her skills, and make an impact, all in an efficient five-year period.
In February 2020, during her third year in the program, Hilsee secured an industrial hygiene internship with Delta, which gave her the opportunity to make a tangible difference on a global brand during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was such a fascinating time to not only be a student studying public health, but to also be interning in the airline industry at a time when travel and connection came to a halt,” says Hilsee. “My manager was also a Rollins graduate, so he definitely knew the skills I was able to bring to the table as a student. Because of that, I was called on early during my internship to be a contributing factor to help them using what I was learning in the classroom and to be a connector to other researchers at Emory during the pandemic.”
Like many Rollins interns before her, she was attracted to the position for the opportunity it provided to see how industrial hygiene is integrated into a major entity’s operations, to get her foot in the door at a global brand, and have the chance to partake in free flight privileges anywhere in the world—a Delta employee perk that she continues to enjoy today.
During the early days of COVID, much of Hilsee’s work involved evaluating air ventilation in Delta’s work spaces and planes, and the brand’s international disinfection procedures. When travel opened up more in 2021-2022, Hilsee was able to pursue more traditional industrial hygiene work through the duration of her internship, including measuring heat, sound, and chemical exposures for Delta employees that spanned various departments.
“Time and time again, in that corporate role, I would work with employees in the flight division, cargo division, and facilities division and Delta always stressed employee safety regardless of the group or the cost. It was definitely cool to have such a front-facing role in helping a company.”
In her full-time role now with Delta Flight Products, Hilsee gets to put the culmination of the skills she developed at Emory and in her internship to work every day in a job concerned with human and environmental safety and health.