MPrint | Changing Courses, Changing Lives

Discovering the unknown, and finding your own place in it, is the mission of any college student’s life. The practicalities that shaped Tad Honsinger’s direction inspired his gift to students today.  The Tad Honsinger Endowed Scholarship in Mississippi State University’s Bagley College of Engineering delivers solid support to those preparing for opportunities yet unseen and for dreams still to be imagined.

“Be willing to change,” Honsinger said. His own life is an example of a future in motion.

Born in upstate New York, Honsinger’s family moved to Artesia, Mississippi, as he was turning nine years old. Their dairy farming operation lay alongside others there, and Honsinger, his brothers and a cousin served as an abundant source of ready labor for the community. From hauling hay to working with cattle, boyhood on the farm taught him discipline and the value of hard work. Those values would serve him well when he set about making his own way in the world.

After high school, his path brought him to Mississippi State, where he sampled a pre-medicine track, then found his home in mechanical engineering. The broad study of the principles of physics and materials drew upon the curiosities of Honsinger’s mind and opened the door to possibilities for his future. What that future would be, he did not know. He had not intended to go into the petroleum field, and he wanted to remain in the United States and away from large cities, but the best opportunities directed him otherwise.

“You have to be willing to adapt to different situations to be able to discover anything new, whether it’s about yourself or about the world,” Honsinger said.

He had extended family living in El Dorado, Kansas and, during his final semester before graduating in 1980 with his mechanical engineering degree, he learned a refinery there was looking for engineers. That company’s offer launched him onto a path that soon led him into a petroleum-based career. The adventure took him to Houston, Texas, then around the world. In his time with Chevron, he enjoyed a thriving exploration that let him discover what could be. Retired and living near Houston now, he enjoys helping today’s students prepare to make those same discoveries for themselves.

“It’s a big investment for a kid to earn a degree today,” he said. “I want the scholarship to help supply kids with enough funding to get in school and take classes without taking on extra work.”

Honsinger looks back on his time as a boy, and his time at Mississippi State, and wants to help students have the opportunity to launch their own lives and find their own direction as he did. The willingness to revise plans, to go wherever discovery may lead, he says, is critical. The simple opportunity to do it is critical as well. Through his scholarship, students learning to be engineers will have opportunities to learn about the world. What they find in it, and where that leads, is up to them, but his help makes real outcomes possible from future dreams.

Honsinger’s life brought him from upper New York to eastern Mississippi, then to the heart of the Great Plains, on to the hustle of Houston and, from there, into a world bigger and broader than he’d ever imagined. His time at Mississippi State set him onto a path of discovery. Today, his scholarship helps others as they prepare to make discoveries for themselves.