Carrying an empty donut box, or a container full of old speakers, or even a toaster, it’s easy to spot senior Tate Holley on campus. 

An avid engineering student, Holley built five bat houses for his Boy Scout project to help the community and earn his Eagle rank. This was the last thing that he had to do in order to reach the final rank in Boy Scouts.

You can see the bat houses spread throughout Central Park, Bridgeport Park, Duane Hart Park and the Iron Horse Trail Head. The project spanned the course of a year, including discussions with park rangers, selecting spots, drilling four-foot holes, building the houses on 21-foot-tall poles, putting the poles into 4-foot holes and filling them with concrete, leaving the five houses 17 feet above the ground. 

“The houses are so high up because bats can’t just start flapping like a bird to fly. They have to drop into a glide, and so they need to be high up,” Holley said.

However, building bat houses is not the only thing Tate Holley is known for. He also enjoys 3-D printing. 3-D printing is an activity run here on campus in J-3. Holley has printed an entire helmet from Star Wars, plastic bunnies that Holley printed to torture Mr. Williams last school year.

“I actually only have two Lord of the Rings prints. Most of the things I printed are just random things I thought were funny – for example, Max Davis’s head,” Holley said. 

He has 3-D printed more Lord of the Rings items than one can count, so it’s pretty clear that Holley is a huge nerd. However, he disagrees: “I don’t consider myself a nerd or a geek, I’m more of both,” Holley said.

On top of Boy Scouts and 3-D printing, he has been writing a book during his high school career. He first started February 2022 and is currently on the third draft of it. 

Holley has also been the president of Star Wars club for 2 years. You’d think he would be good at lightsaber battles, but Bryce Iwai says otherwise. “He isn’t very good at sword fighting,” Iwai said.

Even though Holley pursues many different interests of his, he wants to pursue engineering as a career after high school. However, he still finds value in his other pursuits.

“Don’t get so carried away in the school things, that you forget to take time to have fun,” Holley said.