Here are the summaries from the very first series of Stem 4 Her talks given at Shorewood High School during early 2015. The site for Stem4Her has now moved to http://stem4her.weebly.com
Anh is an environmental engineer and designs water and waste water treatment facilities. Without environmental engineers we would have no sanitation, open defecation, no potable water and major disease problems - her work helps people and the environment co-exist. Her slides are available here.
When Anh was at high school she liked chemistry and math, and wanted to study them more at college. She selected a college that was in state (Arizona) but was also a few hours from home so she had her independence. In her first years at college she studied Chemistry, Math and Physics, which provided her with solid building blocks in these fields before adding in chemical engineering (including topics like - fluid dynamics, thermodynamics) and environmental engineering topics (including - hazardous waste management, water treatment design). When she was studying for undergraduate degree she did an internship, which was a research scientist internship and was also the basis for her dissertation. This helped her to realize that she wanted to become an environmental engineer and that she'd need a masters degree to achieve this goal. After graduating with her masters degree she worked in an office that was responsible for reviewing specs and design plans for water system engineering projects submitted by other companies. After nearly a year on the job she knew this wasn't the job for her. She wanted to be creating and designing systems not spending her time reviewing the work of others. She moved to a company called Carolla Engineers which is a consulting company. She is a lead engineer and works on the design of water and waste water facilities. She has been working there for 8 years. In that time she's designed about 5 or so waste water facilities. To become a certified engineer requires taking professional engineering exams and you then have the letters P.E. after your name (Professional Engineer). To become certified requires taking an 8 hour exam, which requires you to be familiar with many of the subjects you studied at college. Then you need to work for 4 years for a company that can supervise your work (or 3 if you have a masters degree in engineering). At the end of the 4 years you have to take another 8 hour exam. Although Anh describes herself as an environmental engineer and that's the type of work she does, she took the exams to become a Professional Civil Engineer, as its common for the work she does to be done by people who have civil engineering degrees. Anh provided two great diagrams on the water treatment process showing how leaves a lake and is then guided through a system and many processes to arrive out our houses. She also showed the waste water treatment process as well - so cool to learn about all the different processes that happen to the waste water so it can be cleaned and used in different ways. She showed us some of her design work. When she's working on a project she will have to think about the design of the process for one part of the water or waste water - she knows what parts she needs to include in the design of the system (e.g., sizes of tanks, and pipes) and she'll sketch them in a simple design. She passes off her sketches and annotations to a CAD (computer aided design) designer who will convert her sketches into 2-D diagrams, and eventually into 3-D model drawings. Sometimes they'll even print with a 3-D printer! During this process there is a lot of discussion between all the people working on the project and changes are made. There are a lot of different type of engineers working on the project (civil engineers, electrical engineers, geologists, etc). Everyone has an area of expertise and the design solution has to take into account the needs and opinions of the group. She loves what she does, and believes its an honor to work as an environmental engineer to help people and the earth co-exist. She showed a graph that shows the recent massive population growth of the last 100 years or so and that as there's a limited amount of water in the world we have to be creative to distribute the water mindfully. Anh is involved in a non-profit Water for People that raises funds for projects in countries where they need potable water and sanitation solutions. Today 884 million people live without potable water and 2.5 billion people are without sanitation. Its also a serious women's problem as in many of these countries it is the responsibility of the women and girls to walk for miles to collect water everyday which can interrupt their opportunities to go to school or do other tasks. Anh was enthusiastic about her work. She encourages us to visit a waste water facility called Bright Water Waste Facilities http://www.kingcounty.gov/environment/brightwater-center/education/tour-plant.aspx - they offer tours, and their website is full of great information about the processes. Video Links:
- 777 Static Test - testing the structural strength of 777 (see the wings come off) - Link - Flight Tests - Link 1 and Link 2 Doreen is an engineering manager at Boeing and is responsible for testing the structure of the new planes to ensure they are structurally safe. She started working at Boeing when she left college where she got a degree in Electrical Engineering, but after a couple of years at Boeing she moved to moved to California to work in as test programmer on lasers. Eventually she wanted to move back to Seattle and so she took a job with a company that produced pace-makers and other medical devices. She eventually returned to Boeing. She enjoyed the challenge of working in different locations (California), different industries (Medical, Laser), and different size companies (startups, corporations) - she thinks its important to find what type of situation suits you and its okay to try different situations to find out what works for you. One of her favorite aspects of the job she has now is testing planes on their early flights. Her team is responsible for instrumenting the planes so when they are in the air teams can evaluate how the plane's construction is responding to different stresses. To do this they have to install special equipment that can take readings that will provide them with the right data. At different times in the creation process planes are tested in different ways. They can run some stress tests very early based on the designs. Then a later step is to evaluate the structures in labs, like Wind Tunnels, to see if the plane can withstand the pressures that it was designed for (i.e., did they get the calculations right!). Eventually the plane is considered safe enough for Flight Missions. This is the moment when the plane is flown in different weather conditions. Sometimes Doreen flies on the planes during the flight missions as a test engineer so she can monitor the measurement equipment and make adjustments to the data being collected. Because they need to fly the plane in a variety of specific weather conditions she has to be ready to head out on flight missions at short notice - for example if they know the weather is going to be particularly cold over a part of Alaska they'll head up there for some testing, or warm stormy conditions they'll head to Hawaii. Some days on Flight Missions the planes will continuously be taking off and landing and performing specific maneuvers like turning. One project she worked on was to evaluate the wing structure of a plane in development. While working on this project she got to see in the test labs a full size plane be stressed so much that it wings came off! This was part of the plane - they wanted to know the that their calculations were correct about the amount of stress the wings could take - it behaved as they expected. Pauline is new to engineering and arrived at Boeing not as an engineer but as an admin. Pauline has a degree in architecture. However she realized as she was taking internships at college that a career in architecture was not what she wanted to do. While working as an admin at Boeing she talked with people around her and learned more about the role of the engineer and what type of work they did - she became very interested in the job. With encouragement from those around her and her own realization that engineering was something she wanted to do, she decided to make the move to return to school for a mechanical engineering degree. She is still working full-time and she's now been assigned to an entry level test engineering position. She loves it - she loves the work she does, the problems she has to solve, and the people she get's to work with. Doreen asked, "Who here likes to solve problems?" Many raised their hands. Engineering is all about solving problems. She contrasted the role of the engineer with science. Science is about thinking of big questions to investigate to prove something, engineering is about wanting to do something and figuring out ways to solve the problem and get it to happen. Pauline and Doreen both believe that having an engineering degree is a great foundation for whatever career you want to do in the future, as it shows a certain level of competence in core areas, such as math, science, approach to problem solving, applying procedures. Doreen emphasized that the US isn't generating enough engineers and this is not good for the US in terms of staying a world leader. We need more! AND we need greater diversity in the engineering work force. The best solutions come from diverse teams as different perspectives generate innovative and new solutions. When Rebecca was in high school she wasn't sure what she wanted to do. She loved lots of different things. She was inspired by movies, art, and the creative process. During her high school years she started to experience computer games, and one called Myst caught her attention as it was a game that started to use beautiful graphics and story telling as the core part of the game. She was intrigued and realized that she could combing being creative and artistic with something like computers.
She had no experience in coding when she went to college. When she was looking for a college to attend she knew she wanted a mid-size college where it wasn't thousands of students but also not so small she'd know everyone - Carnie Melon University (CMU) was a good match. She also looked for colleges that offered computer science courses for students who hadn't programmed before. She also liked the program as CMU has a strong arts program and so she was still able to pursue that part of her interests. She got to do a couple of well-paid internships as a computer science major. This allowed her to save up and travel. Her are of focus in Computer Science was Human Computer Interaction (HCI) which is the study of psychology, people, design and technology. It was the perfect fit for her interests as it allowed her to combine art, people and design. On graduating she got a job with Microsoft as a Program Manager. Sometimes this role has other names at different companies, like Product Manager or User Experience Strategist. She loved the job as she got to continue to dabble in all aspects of creating and designing a product. She loves being given a problem that she has to solve. For example she mentioned one project she worked on was to design the Start Menu for Windows 8 - they started the project just as touch screens were starting to show up on computers and tablets. In her role she has to coordinate the work and input of many people. She sees herself as the center of a wheel and then there are spokes out to other jobs. She works with designers (who are doing the visual side of the product), user researchers (who work on understanding people and t esting designs with people), developers (who are writing the code) and testers (who are making sure the code is good quality). She has to make sure everyone is on schedule to deliver the right pieces at the right time and that everyone has a chance to contribute ideas to get to the best solutions. She enjoyed working at Microsoft. The work also paid well, and has allowed her to save up to take time off from work now to pursue working on a startup project idea of her own. Hilary Prathner is a senior at the University of Washington. She's in the informatics department. When she was in high school she liked lots of activities such as being on the Cheer team, Theater, Debate and Math! One particular math teacher influenced her thinking for what to study in college, Mrs. Pane helped her consider something like working with technology even though Hillary hadn't done any programming. Hillary decided to go to University of Washington because it was a big university, had lots of courses on offer and was a beautiful campus. UW offers computer coding classes to students who haven't done it before, so Hillary started with these classes. On teacher encouraged Hillary to think about majoring in technology, and spent time with Hillary explaining to her different career paths that would be possible if she majored in a technology subject. She gravitated to the School of Informatics. The school offers a variety of computer courses and also courses on understanding people and designing great experiences (very similar to HCI, that Rebecca studies). The classes exposed her to designing software, digital mockups, mood boards and coding. She enjoyed all the different aspects but decided her favorite area was coding. She took two summer internships. One internship was at microsoft - it was part of a special program where she got to spend 3 weeks as a developer, 3 weeks as a tester, and 3 weeks as a program manager. Her second internship was at Square (they produce a mobile card reading application). She was a developer writing code on this project. Recently she's been applying for full-time jobs - she's had a large choice to apply for, and has been made several offers. She's decided to work for a mid-size startup called Tune. Her advice for you is:
Brooke decided on which college to attend based on her hobbies - snowboarding, so ended up at the University of Utah because there are 6 ski parks nearby! She thought she wanted to be a lawyer. As she progressed, she applied for scholarships (applied for 50?!) and ended up with 2 full scholarships offers. She took a scholarship that required her to specialize in a math related subject. Initially she thought she was going to do mechanical engineering, but then after taking a couple of classes she decided it was going to be civil engineering. She did internships when she was in college. She got to work on designing road signs. It was when she started her work on internships that the academic subjects she was studying in school started to be applied to the real world. She talked about 4 of her favorite projects she's worked on. Lower Granite Removable Spillway Weir, Snake River Young juvenile salmon migrate upstream along the Columbia river. Because of constructions such as the Lower Granite Dam there are concerns this has been harming the salmon's ability to swim upstream, so one solution has been to provide a removable spillway weir - this reduces the flow of the water and the depth of the water the salmon have to swim in to move up stream. Above is a photography of the removable spillway. All the sides of the spillway shown in the photo are made of steel, which can be flimsy, so Brooke's job was to design plates on the spillway that would strengthen the steel sides. This spillway also needed to sink when required, such as if there was a flood and they needed to let all the water flow as quickly as possible. She had to calculate the center of gravity of each of the pieces so that it would collapse safely to sink, and then it would be raised by inflation devices. Murray Morgan Bridge, Tacoma, WA Brooke shared the project management responsibility for the renovation of the Murray Morgan Bridge. The part of the project she was responsible for was $35 million dollars! The main road span of the bridge can be raised horizontally, it works with a counter-weight pulley system (the two big rectangles near the top of the pillars in the photo). Because they were going to be removing parts of the bridge she needed to design a lock to hold the weights in place so they didn't lower while the work was being completed. The old lead paint on the bridge also needed to be removed and because its not healthy to let the lead paint blow into the air they had to create a plastic wrapper around the bridge so the work could happen inside - figuring out how to wrap the bridge in a plastic casing was her responsibility. A problem did occur on this project as she'd been told that the maximum wind speed the plastic wrap had to withstand was 75mph, but while they were working on the project a wind of 90mph was recorded and this caused the wrap to break in some places (see photograph). This then lead to some pollution clean up work and working with environmental engineers. In addition to designing elements of the project Brooke was also responsible for coordinating many of the different teams that worked on the project, managing the schedules for the work, and to make sure the work was done without overspending the budget. And on a personal note Brooke met her fiancee while working on this project! I-405 South Bellevue Design Build - I405/I90 Interchange A couple of years ago there was a major road project at the I405/I90 interchange as new lanes were added to I405. Many companies were involved in the project and responsible for different pieces. Brooke got to work on one of the projects. One part of the project was related to managing the drainage of the area. When the rain falls on a piece of land, it seeps into the ground or runs off on the soil to find a natural point back into the earth. As houses and roads are built it changes the natural way the falling rain drains from the area. This project required Brooke to consider how the rain water would drain from the area so that it wouldn't cause landslides, flooding, or any type of environmental damage. She had to calculate the water run-off rate for different situations. She did this mostly with the a CAD (computer automated design) system. They constructed a large detention pond that you can see on the photo (triangle of land in the lower right of photography). When there's a high rainfall the water can run-off the road and construction to this space without causing problems. The water also has to be treated before its allowed to flow into the water ecosystem. When we're driving through intersections we may see trees and landscaping but the there is a lot of engineering work that goes into constructing safe and environmentally friendly environments that we don't always know about. As Brooke said, "Often if we get our job right, you won't notice the work of civil engineers because you just get to do what you want to do without any problems." Bridges to prosperity - Ducuale Grande, Nicaragua She took a leave of absence from her job so she could work on a volunteer project in Nicaragua. The project was called Bridges to Prosperity (LINK to learn more about the cool program and internship possibilities). Seasonal weather can cause problems for communities. In one neighborhood, communities were cut off from services because when the heavy rains came it caused flooding of rivers making it impossible to access roads to get into towns nearby. The organization designs the bridges for the projects and the work is completed by volunteers in the community, with donated supplies. Brooke's role was that of project manager. She lived with a family while she worked on the project for 2 months. She helped the project acquire the resources from donations, made sure they had the right supplies and tools for the work, and organized and supervised the teams of volunteers to actually construct the project. The project in Nicaragua required planks of wood, these were provided by a man with a chain saw chopping down trees and turning into planks! The project is one of her favorites as she found it incredibly rewarding working in the village where the project was constructed and actually knowing the people of the village who would be using it. She said she spoke some Spanish before she went and learned more while there, but with acting out what was required, or drawing on paper she was able to communicate a lot with the volunteers. Brooke has worked in small and large companies and her preference is for smaller companies as she gets to know more of the people in a small place. Depending on the job she's signed up for she can sometimes spend up to 25% of her time out of the office on the project sites. Today, after talking with us, she was going to be visiting the site of Bertha, the tunnel digger, in Seattle that hasn't been working for several months. Advice
Make room for the A in STE-A-M - you main follow a science or engineering school path or career path but keep mixing in the A(rts) or people focused activities. These skills are invaluable to a successful and happy career. Be a risk taker - Try things out - Wendi's a risk taker, she tries new things that interest her. She mentioned she'd recently worked recently for a startup consulting firm recently that went out of business - when it didn't work out she looked at it as a learning experience and she went on to new things. Stay in math and science in high school as it keeps your options open - it makes life easier if you have done this in school as it gives you more options in college. Do what you do best - Wendi learned there are things she loves to do and is really good at, and other things she can pass on. You'll learn what those things are for you. School Wendi was good at science and math in school and her councilor suggested she try engineering in college. At first she thought she was going to be a mechanical engineer, but by the end of the first year she'd switched to electrical engineering. Most of the first year classes at college for engineering are more or less the same so its easy to switch between them. She worked through her engineering subjects at college but would always take other subjects -in fact a couple of the classes she found most interesting were not in engineering. She offers the advice of staying in math and science in high school as it keeps your options open as you learn more about what you might like to do - however she says you can always catch up, its just that it gets harder later on. STE-A-M She thinks that the letter A should be added to STEM as engineering is as much an ART as a science. It's the art of bringing the people together, of being creative in the solutions, and of figuring out what people want. Early Career She started her engineering work when cellular technology was starting up. When she worked with Motorola she got to work on several projects. One project in particular was in in Japan - this was a project where she found using her people skills super important, and is an example of the A in STEAM. To be successful on the project required her to understand how the cultures of the team from the US worked with the team from Japan. Many of her projects required her to be out of the office. One project she worked on was to make sure the quality of a cellular network was good. The problem that was happening was people where losing their cell phone calls in certain locations on certain phones - and they needed to figure out whether it was a networking problem (information being sent to and from a cell tower) or the device (the phone in the persons hand). She spent several week in a van with other engineers driving around the area and running signal tests. She learned in that project how to deal with people who had different needs. The manager from the networking team wanted the network to be rock solid, so wanted to be patient to make sure they fixed the problem for the long-term. The manager from the device-phone team wanted a quick solution as he wanted to quickly stop customers complaining about the problem and stop them from leaving the phone plan. Later Career Wendi switched to a civil engineering company - this company designed and built huge systems that required large teams, often working around the world, and the projects might take years to complete. One of the projects she worked on was to manage traffic on freeways. She worked on the project that added the mini-traffic lights that you see when you're on a ramp about to enter the freeway. These traffic lights help to keep traffic flowing by controlling the frequency the cars get on the freeway when the traffic is busy. It was an exciting project to work on as they were using early artificial intelligence to get the systems to work. She liked to bring the human element to many of her projects by asking 'What is the user experience going to be like when we do this?' She worked on technology and security projects for supply chains. One example was understanding the supply chain of importing toilets from Turkey! She had to understand the complete process from manufacturing, packaging, transportation system (boats, ports, trains) to insure that a specific security level was achieved and how to use technology to achieve this. Another example was the supply chain for Starbucks, and the importation of coffee from Guatemala.
Environment Matters
Amgen website: http://amgen.com Want to learn more about what a job in Regulatory Affairs looks like at Amgen: LINK More information about careers in Immunology Careers in Immunology http://vbs.psu.edu/majors/iid/careers How to become an Immunologist Link Career posting in Immunology http://jobs.sciencecareers.org/jobs/immunology/ We're looking forward to kicking our first session on Wednesday with Carol Krantz, who is president of Bionow Consulting. She has a BA in Biology and a PhD in Immunology/Microbiology.
Bring your questions! And don't forget to complete the survey. Complete it before the first session and you'll have a chance to win a $10 Starbucks gift card! |
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