Taylor Payne

During high school, Taylor Payne of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, began working on robotics competitions. That experience took her places, including to China where she worked alongside Chinese robotics students. It also led her to pursue a degree in engineering.

While working on robots was fun, Payne discovered a passion for power engineering at UW-Madison. “Power engineering is crucial for the future and all countries are dependent on the infrastructure provided by power engineering,” Payne says. “I think it is important for these infrastructures to be clean and resilient and continuing to work on improvement in these areas will be beneficial to society.”

Payne, an electrical engineering major, works at the Memorial Union kitchen and likes to spend her free time reading, snowboarding, baking, taking walks and exploring Madison. Though she does not have firm plans after graduation in May, she knows what type of work she’s looking for. “I really enjoyed my classwork on power transmission and am interested in continuing to work on power transmission or in a similar field such as power generation with renewable energy,” she says.