“It all started with some advice from my guidance counselor at Saginaw High back in 1993. He said ‘Hey, you got all A's in math and science. You should be an engineer.’
I said, ‘What's an engineer?’
At that point, I thought that's just the guy on the train that does the choo-choo thing. He showed me a list of all the different disciplines in engineering and their respective salaries. So, based on my love of cars, those respective salaries, and my grades in math and science, I asked, ‘If I pick this one, can I design cars for a living?’
He said yes, so I picked mechanical engineering. I looked up all the engineering schools, and Michigan Tech was one of the top in the country. So, I got some scholarships, got recruited for football, went to Michigan Tech to get my mechanical engineering degree, and then began working in the automotive industry for the big three here in Michigan.
After about 12 years, I moved to Los Angeles and got a job with SpaceX. Here I was, a kid from Saginaw, building a ROCKET. It was mind blowing to me. Building a rocket is intense—EVERYTHING has to be right because if it isn’t, the rocket can blow up in less than a second.
My role in that process was to make sure that if we told the government or NASA we were building ‘Rocket A’ with certain parts, I had to check those parts and make sure they were all correct to the latest revision.
Elon came to work one day and out of the blue said, ‘We need to have landing legs on the rocket, so we can land it back here and reuse it.’ Six months later, we started testing out the landing legs. A year later, we nailed it! We landed the rocket and started reusing it. The futuristic vision is what inspired me working with Elon both at SpaceX and Tesla.
Seeing all those successful SpaceX missions, I was just ecstatic. Those were proud moments and just life changing, really. It was something bigger than myself that I was a part of and helped to accomplish.
But I really wanted to put my years of automotive experience to work…and Tesla was right next door. I prayed and prayed about it…and then I got a job at Tesla. I worked on the Model X, which is the SUV with the doors that go up like a Lamborghini. Those doors were having issues with intersecting when I got there so my role was to fix that issue.
When we got it fixed, I got an email from Elon Musk, which was pretty cool! He said how much my contribution to that resolve that issue meant and how happy he was to have me there. I still have that email!
The interesting part about working there was Elon doesn't have a huge office. He had a cubicle, right by us and was very accessible. The only thing he had was a table in the cafeteria that no one else could eat at. It's not labeled. You just know that’s Elon’s table. He's awesome, approachable and obviously very, very bright and smart.
I worked at Tesla for about two years and it was an awesome experience, both jobs were unbelievable experiences. They inspired me to start thinking about how I was going to inspire someone else in the world? What was I going to do to create something bigger than myself?
With that in mind, in 2019 I created Saginaw STEM as a way to give back to my hometown community by helping kids get into STEM careers. I want to help kids here get some of those same opportunities that I had.
Now, we're bringing STEM Fest to Bay City, and I couldn't be more excited."
“I was working at Tesla, but there were kids back home who needed opportunities, and I wasn’t going to keep waiting for someone else to do it. People like to complain about the things we don’t have here, but I wanted to be part of the solution. I wanted to create those opportunities. I wanted kids growing up just like I did to have even a portion of the lifestyle that I've been able to live. I liked cars and I developed that into a career in engineering, and that changed everything for me: my whole family, my earning potential, and our legacy.
That’s what I want to give to our kids.
So I moved back to LA, saving every penny while I lived in the back of my friend’s garage, planning Saginaw STEM. Then one day, I posted to social media that I was going to start an after-school program to help kids in Saginaw, and asked what kinds of programs were needed.
The response was unanimous: “STEM”.
One of my buddies said I needed to meet Dr. Calvin Mackie in New Orleans who runs the STEM Nola program. I sent him an email, and eventually we set up a Zoom call where he said, ‘If you’re serious about this, you need to be at my next event.’
So me and Alexis Thomas booked a ticket to New Orleans to check out STEM Nola’s “Rocket Day”. There were 500 to 600 kids there, and every kid gets to build a rocket and launch it! Every. Kid. It was mind blowing.
I came away from that with one question: when can I have my first event?
We did our first event the next month, and we've been doing STEM Saturdays ever since.”
“STEM Fest in Bay City is going to be huge. I haven’t been this excited in a long time. We’ll be looking at Newton’s Laws of Motion, and we’ll have 40+ STEM activities for kids of all ages. If a kid falls in love with an activity, they could stay there for the entire three hours. If they want to bounce around and try them all, that’s cool, too! We’ll have a drone cage, robots…everything! It’s going to be awesome.
It’s going to be magic, and I’m hoping that this event will help launch regular STEM Saturdays in Bay City.”
—Dante Davis, Saginaw STEM
Dante Davis, along with a host of community partners, is bringing STEM Fest to Bay County on June 8th from 9:30am to 12:30pm at the Bay-Arenac ISD. Bay County kids will be able to experience STEM Fest: 40+ STEM activities for free! Register your child at: https://bit.ly/49hocEH
