When Rev. Ryan Mack ’15 walks across the Mines campus today, the experience is both familiar and entirely new. As an undergraduate student, he spent four years immersed in engineering classes, late-night study sessions and weekend adventures in the nearby mountains. Now, a decade later, he has returned to campus but this time as the university’s Catholic chaplain, supporting students as they navigate their own formative years at Mines. And Mack sees his engineering and religious experiences as closely linked.
Mack always had a clear sense of curiosity about how the world worked, so a STEM career path seemed like a no-brainer. “I knew pretty early on that I wanted to go into engineering,” Mack said. “When I was really young, I wanted to be an inventor, and then, eventually learned that inventors are just engineers.”
By the time he toured colleges, he knew Mines was the right place for him. “I loved that Mines was fully devoted to engineering. The whole campus is built for forming engineers,” Mack said. “I liked working with physical systems, especially things that I could get my hands on and work with. I went into engineering very much to build cool things.”
After graduating, he began a career with Western Industrial Contractors, designing steel support structures for large material-handling systems. He enjoyed the work, but he also began discerning a new calling.
“A lot of people say to me, going from engineering to priesthood is a huge career switch,” Mack said. “But it wasn’t as much of a straightforward comparison of an engineering career versus a ministry career. It was very much an evaluation and prayerful discernment of what state of life God was calling me into.”
Despite this career shift, Mack’s engineering mindset is still in play. As he worked through his seminary studies in philosophy and theology, he found similar patterns to those he knew from his engineering background. “I found a lot of crossover,” he said. “The type of philosophy and theology we were doing was very systematic. I loved studying engineering because I wanted to figure out the way that the world worked, and there was something really similar in studying systematic philosophy and theology of being able to dive into the way creation works.
“In engineering at Mines, I was studying the physical world and the way cause and effect work in our physical experience. Our philosophy studies were strongly metaphysically based, and metaphysics is another level of understanding how natural beings in the world exist and are constructed on a philosophical or metaphysical level. When you take that into theology, a lot of the way that we study how God supernaturally redeems and sanctifies creation is looking at the way that He takes the natural structures that He’s built into the physical world and elevates that into a supernatural plane while paralleling the natural structures on the physical plane. To be able to layer those systems all the way down and more deeply understand what God was doing on a supernatural plane from analogies made from the natural world and from my own understanding of the natural world, even from an engineering background, was a really cool parallel for me.”
In 2023, Mack received his first assignment as a priest—one that brought him back to Golden. Today, he oversees a broad network of Catholic life on the Mines campus. “I’m responsible for the umbrella institution of campus ministry,” he explained, including FOCUS ministries, the Catholic Men’s and Women’s houses, and student clubs. He also teaches study groups, prepares students for sacraments and spends countless hours meeting with students.
“It has very much been a kind of coming home in this first assignment,” he said. “It’s a community that I know well. I love the campus. It’s amazing to be back there again.”
He sees in today’s students the same intellectual drive that shaped his own college years. Many of them approach faith with an engineer’s instinct for understanding. “You have a lot of students who are on a really intentional and deep search for explanation and believe there’s truth out there to be discovered,” Mack said.
Mack understands how transformative that combination of curiosity and community can be for students. He grew up practicing Catholicism but discovered the depth of his faith in college. Now, he hopes to help others find a similar sense of community and faith and support students as they navigate their Mines experience and deeper questions about meaning and purpose.
For Mack, returning to Mines is not just a professional assignment but a continuation of the same curiosity and commitment that first brought him to campus. “Engineers are my people,” he said. “It’s a community that I feel very comfortable with. I’m very much at home.”
About Mines
Colorado School of Mines is a public R1 research university focused on applied science and engineering, producing the talent, knowledge and innovations to serve industry and benefit society – all to create a more prosperous future.
