How Fairmont State Helped One Student Turn Potential into a Career

Emilio Maset has always known how to listen to himself. When he arrived at a large state university in the fall of 2021, it didn’t take long to recognize that something wasn’t quite right for him there.

“School started on a Wednesday,” he said. “I went Wednesday, Thursday, and by Friday I knew it wasn’t the place for me.”

It wasn’t that Maset didn’t love learning. He did – deeply. He just hadn’t yet found the right fit. A semester of reflection and a change of direction later, he landed at Fairmont State University, initially enrolled in nursing. That path shifted, too. But when he told his parents he thought he wanted to work with computers, their response stopped him short.

“They said, ‘We’ve been telling you that your entire life.’”

Maset graduated in December 2025 with not one but two degrees – a bachelor’s in computer science and a bachelor’s in mathematics.

What drew him to Fairmont State and kept him there was something harder to quantify than a course catalog. After his brief experience at a larger school, he wanted a campus that felt like a campus.

“It felt like it was just a city with some college buildings sprinkled in,” he said. “Here, it actually feels like a place. You can park your car in the morning and get everywhere.”
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That sense of community extended into the classroom. Maset speaks about his professors with a warmth that’s hard to miss. Among those who left a lasting impression: Professor Ted LaRue and Professor Alice LaRue, both retired from the faculty, along with Dr. Mahmood Hossain, Dr. Robert Niichel and Dr. Joseph Riesen.

“I have very few complaints about the professors I had,” he said. “I feel lucky to say that.”

It was Ted LaRue who first nudged Maset toward a math minor, framing it as just a few extra courses. When Maset took him up on it, LaRue encouraged further exploration, pointing out that the full math major was not out of reach.

Beyond the classroom, Maset’s time at Fairmont State took him further than most students travel. Through a partnership with a university in Japan, he and a fellow computer science student spent a week participating in an international drone programming workshop, then stayed an extra week to explore.

Closer to home, he spent a summer engaged in undergraduate research under Niichel, applying machine learning to a question about student academic behavior. The results were modest by his own account, but the experience was not. 

“It was much more challenging than I expected,” he said. “But I felt proud of doing that work.”

That research also opened a door he didn’t see coming. Niichel connected him with a leadership figure at a prominent federal research facility, a conversation that eventually led to an internship, and from there to where he is today, building a career in a technical field he finds genuinely exciting.

“My connections with my professors at Fairmont State made pivoting into a career very manageable,” he said. Maset graduated without student loan debt. Scholarship support made that possible, and he doesn’t take it lightly.

“I applaud anybody that is giving money to someone in need,” he said. “And for education specifically, I further applaud donors who still put education on a pedestal.”

Looking back, Maset distills four years of experiences, discoveries, and hard-won growth into a single piece of advice for the students just now beginning their own Fairmont State journeys.

“Have a growth mindset,” he said. “See a learning opportunity in every single thing that you do. That’s what kept me sane through the challenges, and I think it’ll get you far not just academically, but professionally, and personally, too.”

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