What first made you decide to pursue an engineering degree?
My background is in audio recording and music composition. As I worked in recording studios, I kept having ideas for pieces of recording equipment or music synthesizers that I wanted to make. When the company I worked for shut down their media production department, I took the opportunity to come to the U to study electrical and computer engineering so I could learn how to make the stuff I wanted to use.
What were two (ongoing or temporary) challenges you face in school and how do you overcome them?
1. Starting the day. On many days, I just don’t want to get up. So I have an awful sounding alarm set for the morning and to shut it off I have to get out of bed. Once I'm up, I figure I'd better just get to work.
2. Getting stuck in a problem. Many times I'll be working on a problem and I just can't solve it. Usually, that means it's time to take a break and take a walk around campus to let my mind wander. More often than not when I'm not even thinking about the problem, an idea will spring into my head about how to solve it. Ultimately, it might not be the actual solution but it provides another way to approach the problem.
If you could travel back in time to (blank) what piece of advice would you give yourself?
It's ok to fail. Embrace the failure, figure out why you failed, try not to do it again. But even repeat failures are ok too.
How has your career success been benefitted or affected by participating with SWE as a student?
Remains to be seen 🙂 But the resume workshops and reviews, and the Evening With Industry events have been very valuable to me in preparing for future careers. Plus, having a network of other SWE members is a great resource to tap.
What tips would you give Engineering students struggling with balancing difficult courses?
Get in a study group, talk to the TAs, talk to the professor, start on assignments immediately when they're available so you can get a feel for how difficult they are. And if you've done all that, don't be afraid to drop a class and take it again later. Some semesters I've had workloads that were too much and instead of spreading myself too thin and doing a bad job in all the classes, I'd drop a class and do a much better job in the remaining ones.
Why would you encourage men AND women to join SWE, and how should the nation solve the gender gap in STEM?
I did a quick lookup of this year's enrollment for my area, electrical and computer engineering: 13% Female. (https://www.obia.utah.edu/data/student-data/course-enrollment-profile/) I wish I knew how to solve that gap. But time and time again I hear stories of people saying something like "I didn't know someone like me could do that until I saw..." and they refer to some show or news story or movie that showed a person like them doing something awesome. Representation and visibility are important. It's also important for men to join SWE as well because whatever barriers exist that cause a gender gap, breaking them down involves all genders getting together. I'm truly happy that SWE allows everyone in.
What would you like to see our SWE section improve on?
Getting more men involved. I don't know how to do it, I've been trying to get more of my classmates involved and it boggles my mind why more of them don't want to come hang out with such incredible women.