If you had told Travis Scott ’16 five years ago that he would be a distillery production supervisor for a popular craft whiskey brand, he would have laughed and said you were crazy.
Scott has worked at Dad’s Hat in Bristol, Pennsylvania, since he graduated in June 2016, and he loves it. It allows him to not sit at a desk all day and keeps him extremely busy, he says. It’s a job where, he jokes, “you shower when you get home from work, rather than before you go in.”
“We liked Travis’ enthusiasm and the fact that he possessed the skills necessary to be a distiller the moment we met him,” says Dad’s Hat co-founder Herman Mihalich, who has served as Scott’s mentor in the distillery over the past year. “Gaining an assistant who possesses a master’s degree in chemical engineering was a dream come true. The fact that he loves what he’s doing comes through in our whiskey.”
At Drexel, Scott went through the accelerated program to earn a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree in chemical engineering. During that time he had three co-op jobs; first he worked as a water-quality monitoring instrument technician with the Philadelphia Water Department, then he worked on industrial paints at AGC Chemicals, and his final co-op was spent working with fluoropolymer fibers at Arkema.
Scott credits his experience with chemical companies and in chemical engineering for helping to prepare him for his current position.
“There are so many aspects to this job,” says Scott. “I never thought I’d be working in producing liquor or beer, but in the back of my mind I hoped that I would. So much of this is both physical and mental. There’s a lot of math and chemistry involved. The best part is that with my previous jobs, I never got to see the results. With this job, I get to see (and taste) everything.”