Matt's Bio

[ASA Matt]

Name: Matthew Lauer
Occupation: First Officer
Airline: Atlantic Southeast Airlines (ASA)
Aircraft: CRJ-200
Location: Atlanta, GA (ATL)
Education: Bachelor of Arts – Speech Communication

While I now know that being an airline pilot is what I was always meant to be, my story, unlike many, doesn’t begin in the womb. My parents both in the medical field, I knew following high school that I didn’t want to be a doctor. In Atlanta since ’94, I began my four years in college at the University of Georgia as a “Business-Undecided” major. In other words, like many college freshman, I didn’t have the first clue what I wanted to do, but business seemed like a good place to start. It wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year—following a semester of economics, accounting, legal studies, and finance, to be exact—that I realized that business was not for me.

I always had an interest in commercial aviation, but I never really considered it a career option until it was casually mentioned to me at a family reunion by my aunt, a career advisor, who, in response to my mother’s pleading, was desperately trying to help me through my mid-college “what do I want to do for a living” phase. Sparking my interest, I began to look into the life of an airline pilot. After extensive research along with talking with the few pilots I eventually came across, I promptly switched my major to something I enjoyed and spent my last years in college deciding how to make my newfound aviation dream a reality.

Probably the hardest thing about starting a career in aviation is just that—starting it. With the myriad of flight training options out there, I found that deciding on a flight school was more challenging than deciding on a college ever was. The good part was that I already had a bachelor’s degree out of the way. While not required to be an airline pilot, a four-year degree, regardless of what it’s in, can be helpful for a number of reasons. My goal now was to find the quickest and most cost effective way to get to the airlines. Fortunately, ATP offered me just that.

In less than a year, I went from zero time to the right seat of a jet. This took a tremendous amount of work, of course. Flight training proved to be more demanding in some aspects than any portion of college ever was. I quickly learned, however, that, throughout the entire process, the most important thing was attitude. You have to want it. The rest just takes time and hard work. What you’ll find in the end is a career that is still one of the most rewarding out there. What helps is knowing where to start, and finding a way to talk to those who have experienced it is the best place to do just that. Good luck!