William “Billy” Burkey ‘03 has been a trailblazer since his time at HPA. He and a group of friends who shared a love for math, science, and engineering started the first robotics team in Hawaiʻi and went on to win the 2002 regional competition in Seattle. This passion continued through college at Carnegie Mellon University with four years of participation in the racecar engineering competition, Formula SAE. After graduating from CMU in 2007 with a Mechanical Engineering degree, Billy joined Elon Musk’s SpaceX as an early employee. For the past 15 years, Billy has been a leader and engineer designing and developing communications, rocket, and spacecraft hardware. For nearly a decade, Billy was the Senior Manager of the Spacecraft mechanical engineering group, which designed, developed, and validated the Dragon 2 spacecraft — the world’s first commercially developed human-rated orbital spacecraft and remains the USA’s only access to space. After a short break, Billy now travels the world as a Principal Engineer designing and installing backhaul communications stations to connect remote communities to high-speed internet with SpaceX’s Starlink LEO constellation. When not engineering, Billy is an avid car and sailboat racer, diver, snowboarder, and adventurer. He strongly believes that with great teams and very hard work, we can create the future we want to live in.
Each January, HPA convenes a panel of graduates to share advice and stories about life after HPA with our seniors. This Q&A occurred during our Young Alumni Day 2023.
What was your favorite part of your HPA experience? What made it so unique?
HPA Olympics was my favorite. HPA taught me the importance of being able to compete — and Olympics is just one of those things, Song Contest was another. We won first place three times. I never really did sports — I did golf — but there’s usually such an emphasis on sports, and I think the importance there is learning teamwork and the ability to compete. I did robotics club and we competed with other robotics clubs and also won. The ability to compete, the desire to win — if you can keep that fire within you, you’ll go great places.
How did your time at HPA help to prepare/impact you for your current career?
You guys are surrounded by peers that are just incredibly brilliant, and motivated. I didn’t really appreciate how amazing the student population at HPA is until I left and went out into the real world. At HPA, you have a small, tight community of motivated and enabled people, and my experience was that I had a really great, strong group of friends and teachers who were all interested in the same cool things — math and science and building robots and playing video games — things that I was interested in, so it was an incredibly nurturing environment, and as long as you’re focused on doing something productive, you can really do a lot with that. It’s really easy to form a strong, high-performing team. Take advantage of that while you can. If you’re excited about something, get your friends excited about it as well and team up and do something amazing.
If you were each hiring for a position, what would you look for in HPA graduates?
Having a thirst to succeed, a thirst to learn, a thirst to compete. People who have tried to get involved in the hardest thing — whether it’s football or robotics or math club — and really have gone out of their way to make sure they’re winning in those places. Just showing that as you’re moving through these different life events that you’re striving to win and you’re picking up skills along the way to win. That’s pretty major. I feel like hard work beats intelligence 99% of the time. Hard work. While other people are sleeping, work harder, get ahead.