Jean Nickerson Patterson, from Bushton, Kansas, and a student at Kansas State University, was chosen along with nearly 100 other college women to participate in the Curtiss-Wright Engineering Cadette Program at Iowa State College (University) in 1943. Sponsored by the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, this was a nationwide program designed to ease to wartime labor shortages, and also included more than 700 female students at Cornell, Purdue, University of Minnesota, Pennsylvania State College (University), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Texas.

The program at Iowa State was an intensive course in aeronautical engineering. The students received a certificate upon completion of the ten-month course (February to December 1943), and were then hired by the Curtiss-Wright Corporation for the duration of the Second World War. As they completed the course, the Curtiss-Wright Corporation paid for the students' room and board, and provided a salary of ten dollars per week.

More than 90 percent of the participants graduated, and 75 percent joined the workforce. Patterson worked for the Quality Control Department at the Curtiss-Wright Plant in St. Louis for nine months before she left to marry Ben Patterson in 1945. She then worked at Elgin Case Company in Independence, Kansas, and for the County Engineer. Following her husband's return from the war in 1946, Jean went back to Kansas State to earn her BA in Medical Technology. She currently resides in Clinton, Iowa and has stayed active in editing newsletters for and attending reunions of the former Curtiss-Wright Cadettes.

This collection includes address lists, copies of the program newsletter, "The Cadetter," a class photograph from Iowa State, and materials related to reunions of participating students. Additional materials concerning the Curtiss-Wright Cadettes Program may be found in Curtiss-Wright Cadettes Program Records, RS 13/16/4.

This collection is arranged alphabetically.