‘Like the ceiling can’t hold us’
Landon Huslig ’15 calls to mind a popular song from his days on campus, one he remembers playing in the hype videos during the Shocker men’s basketball team’s historic, undefeated run to the NCAA Final Four in 2013: “Can’t Hold Us,” by hip-hop duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.
“It’s a little cheesy, but I think it still rings true,” Huslig says with a laugh. “We shouldn’t put a cap or a ceiling on all that we can accomplish.”
It’s clear that’s been Huslig’s mentality throughout his own career, tracing all the way back to his time as a mechanical engineering student at Wichita State. “The long all-nighters, the challenging coursework and tests—in those moments, of course you’re learning the basic principles of engineering,” the alumnus reflects, “but you’re also learning how to learn, how to think about things, how to approach problems.”
That problem-solving has served him well throughout his career. In February of this year, he moved from the hard sciences as an engineer at Koch Industries into his current role as operations manager for the multinational conglomerate’s nonprofit arm, Stand Together Foundation, which aims to address some of today’s most pressing issues—from education to the economy, criminal justice reform to freedom of speech, and a range of topics between—through ground-up solutions. Relying on the skills he gained from his time as a mechanical engineering student, Huslig says the two roles have more in common than may initially meet the eye. “In one camp, you’re solving engineering problems. The other, large-scale social problems,” he reflects. “Of course, both have their own nuances and complexities, but, at the end of the day, they’re all just problems that need to be solved.”
In addition to their own full-time gigs, Landon and his wife, Candace, launched Wichita Life, a local media outlet, in 2017. “We had lived in Corpus Christi for my work for a few years, and when we came back, I noticed a lot of people I grew up with had moved away to bigger cities—Dallas, San Francisco, Kansas City,” Huslig says. “We wanted to share the cool things happening right here in our own city that people may not otherwise know about.”
What started as an Instagram account has grown into a multi-channel media resource and bona fide advocate for all things ICT, currently boasting more than 100,000 followers across its social platforms and 33,000 in newsletter subscribers—and counting. Much more than the follower count, though, the alum says the greatest reward of Wichita Life is their ability to “highlight the real people that are making our city better, sharing their projects, their events, their accomplishments.”
What’s in store, Huslig can’t say for certain, but he has every reason to feel optimistic: for the Wichita Life project, for his career and for the city of Wichita as a whole. He says, “As Shockers, as Wichitans, when we work together and lift one another up, there really is no ceiling to what we can accomplish.”
Huslig will be recognized as a 2025 Young Alumni honoree at this year’s Heritage Gala, Oct. 9.
