Becoming a Nerd: 5th Grade and Beyond

The “Look”

That is what I get when I am asked what I am asked what I am majoring in college. “So what are you studying at college?”, “I am a Junior studying engineering.” “Oh, engineering …”, pause and then the “look” … a girl engineer in engineering … I have gotten used to that same pattern and happily tell the questioner how exciting and challenging engineering is.

But first, how did I even get to this point...

How It All Began

I became a nerd in 5th grade. Yes, in fifth grade. All it took was for my parents to give me a Nintendo Game cube and off I went. But that was not all. It was in this early year of my life that the 10-year-old me made an important announcement: “I wanna be an engineer like daddy!” There. That was it. I made a career decision at the tender age of 10, much to the surprise of everyone around me. You could say my parents were just as surprised with the typical feelings of “With time, she’ll change her mind.” However, I had different plans.

Beyond 5th Grade

Despite the possibilities of me considering other careers, I resolutely stuck with my resolve to become an engineer. I went through the rest of elementary school, junior high, and high school studying to eventually become an engineer, taking as many STEM classes as I can, with a bit of guidance from dad. Of course, I had to deal with the typical yells and cries of “NERD!” occasionally in the earlier years, but that changed once I entered high school and the title of “Nerd” actually became a “badge of honor” for me and not a negative one. Overcoming the original insult was one thing, but the next thing I encountered was the very concept that I read about in engineering memes: Being one of only a few girls in STEM/engineering classes.

Project Lead the Way: The Program that Finalized My Decision…

High school was the time that finalized my decision to become an engineer and I have the Project Lead The Way (PLTW) program to thank for that. If you haven’t heard of it, it is a high school pre-engineering program and my high school is part of this. And they were looking for girls to join it …

PLTW opened my eyes to the world of Engineering even more than ever before. I was first introduced to the reality of being one out of very few girls in PLTW. When I entered my first PLTW class in my sophomore year, I was met with 20 pairs of eyes from boys in my class. Though this seemed daunting at first, I soon overcame the challenges of being a girl in Engineering. Going through PLTW sealed the deal, and I made up my mind to go into Engineering as a career.

1st Engineering Lesson:

I was recruited to the first FIRST Robotics team in my high school when I was in my Junior year. This is when I can say I learnt my first lesson in engineering projects and working in a team. My High School had never had a competitive robotics team before so there was lot of excitement when we kids in the Tech Department/PLTW were invited to form the inaugural team. There were about 40 of us at first and we all got on with it … that was the problem, we just got on with it. Though we were divided into subteams, we did not communicate with each other. The construction guys (and they were mostly boys) started building before the design team completed their drawings; the programming team were coding like crazy and raced ahead of everyone else … needless to say, the first prototype test did not go well and a lot of valuable time was spent in fixing the problems. These FIRST Robotics contests have very rigid schedules and a lot of time was wasted in redoing a lot of the work. I saw for myself how a project should not have been done. I believe our whole team learnt that very important lesson that year.

College and Engineering: The First Two Years.

So when I graduated from high school, I became proudly became an “Enginerd” and enrolled in the Bradley University Caterpillar School of Engineering and Technology in Peoria Illinois.

I found out for myself that engineering school is hard, very hard! But at the same time, challenging, and rewarding.

One of my initial college experience is Engineering school was like the image I had gotten from the Engineering Memes I had seen on Facebook. I entered my first engineering classroom to be greeted in a fashion similar to Project Lead the Way all those years prior. The boys all stared at me like that scene in Toy Story with the little toy green aliens: “OOOO, a stranger from the outside …”.  I was enrolled in Electrical Engineering at first. I immersed myself in the concepts of circuits, electron flow and the like all the meanwhile enjoying time with friends and studying with class mates. Even though I thought Electrical Engineering was for me, my actual aptitude actually lay in a different field.

College: Becoming an ME

But as time went on I soon began to recognize that something was wrong. EE topics became heavy with abstract concepts and coding in languages that I often found I had a hard time processing due to the pace of the classes. After spending many long nights feeling frustrated, I finally made realized that EE was not for me and made the decision to switch my major to Mechanical Engineering. Today in my Junior year, I am very happy I made the switch and enjoying my classes more than ever.

Real World Work Experience

I was fortunate to have been able to intern in the Chicago area last summer with Emerson's Local Business Partner, Novaspect, as a Control Systems Engineering Intern. This introduced me to the world of process control and gave me many valuable lessons about the “real world”. First off, I found out how much I didn’t know. DeltaV graphics I can relate to, but what were I/O lists, function blocks and SFCs, alarms and alarm rationalization and all the other stuff that makes up a control system project? Most of what I had learned up to that point seemed vaguely connected to this real world work. So, I learnt about applications and how to work in a team. I learned to manage the work I was assigned and manage time properly. Overall, interning taught me more about how it is to be an Engineer, not studying to be one, as well as how to work in the professional world. And this has inspired me even more.

Not Quite the End…

All of these parts of my story is just that. Parts of my story. It’s not quite the end yet. It does not really end at interning and neither does it really end after college. My career as a Mechanical Engineer in reality has really only begun while my life as a student will eventually draw to a close leaving me to explore a vast world of career opportunities and stuff that needs fixing. To sum things up, I’ll leave you, the reader, with this: being an Engineer, though it may seem hard, has been one of the most awesome and challenging experiences for me and as I always say, Once an Engineer, Always an Engineer. 

  • Great post Abigail! I love that you write that interning taught you "about how it is to be an Engineer" rather than what engineers do.  How you want to "BE" in life or in other words - "How do you want to show up?" is a far more important  than what you want to "DO".  You are well on your way!!

  • Well stated, Abigail! This is powerful insight for any stage of an engineering career. Your interning experience in "the real world" will be very valuable experience for you back in the classroom. Keep up the great work you are doing. You are already an engineering rock star and an inspiration to others looking to join the fabulous world of STEM or maybe even STEAM.

  • Thanks for your kind words, everyone. I appreciate your advice. :)