Women Engineers From The United States

"Having diverse perspectives is an important aspect to developing innovative solutions to hard problems. Some of it is because, when you have a group of individuals with different experiences that collaboratively contribute to developing a solution, it gets everyone else in the room to think differently and ask different questions. Studies have shown, time and time again, that when you combine different perspectives from a diverse group of people, the result is having better innovations."

"At the time, the only type of engineer I was aware of was one who drove a train. I was not interested in learning how to drive a train, but very much interested in getting away from home for the summer so that I did not have to wash dishes."

"So after my parents went to bed, I'd go grab the phone and I'd wire it up and I’d call my boyfriend. Then I’d unhook it and take it back downstairs,"

"I think in the long run, this focus on less complexity will drive the cost down for generative AI and make it more available for a broader global audience because at this time, it takes a significant amount of money to build a really large gen AI project."

"You can pay crappy money for crappy clothes and throw them away to buy more crappy clothes"

"And my parents, for the life of them, could not figure out why the phone bill was so high. I finally told my mother, like five years ago, that it was me who did that."

"We are getting closer. In addition to Figure’s advances, Amazon is testing Agility Robotics’ Digit, a two-legged robot, in its U.S. warehouses and Elon Musk’s Tesla is developing a humanoid robot called Optimis. That said, I think we are still a little ways from the tipping point since we don’t yet have a low-cost platform at scale."

"Whatever your future holds, I hope you will serve humanity and positively impact the way we live."

"I once stood where you now stand. I know how hard you have worked to get where you are today, and I am impressed by your accomplishments."

"Each of you has your own crew of supporters. You can name those friends and family members right now. Those who believe in you and regularly invest in your well-being. Those who surround you with love and encouragement, giving the best of themselves so that you can be your personal best,"

"I poured these feelings which have been stewing slowly for years into the regimen of restraint I needed to lose ten pounds in 7 weeks. Even this I feared wouldn’t be enough for me to be a viable competitor, but it was all I could reasonably do."

"No matter how many times I go through it, I can’t help but feel its intensity which then mellows into ambivalence, leaving me in a stupor of more emotions than I can count."

"The discipline naturally spilled over into my work and I had a productive start to my entirely separate and equally significant remote work journey. My boyfriend was with me for it all and offered his observations and insights about all the newness in our lives."

"Perhaps they are among the names listed on your acknowledgements page. Perhaps they are sitting across the auditorium now with huge smiles on their faces. Perhaps they will be hooding you today. You know who they are."

"I think we are about a year to three years away from that. When we get there, these robots will begin to displace the factory floor’s lower skill manual jobs, but it will not yet replace the knowledge worker, at least not immediately."

"The first one is a favorite is because when I was young, I got to see man go to the Moon."

"My academic career now combines all this to try and understand the expression patterns of these cell surface receptors in cardiovascular disease."

"Yes, there weren’t any African American women studying aerospace/mechanical like me. There weren’t any at my university, which was a historically Black college. I could have said that I felt out of sorts but because I played sports most of my life and I played with boys, I didn’t really feel so out of place."

"You must have confidence in yourself, and for me my spiritual grounding was very important, knowing that God loves me as much as he loves anybody else and that He’ll fight battles I can’t. I’m not in a room to fight. I just believe in myself, and I believe in Him. Some of the groups I was a part of at MIT never had a woman or an African American before."

"I was resistant to the notion of mentors for a long time, and part of that was probably me being defensive in the sense that people don’t randomly come up to folks like me and nominate us. For a long time, I didn’t get opportunities to interact with mentors in the way you might traditionally describe, but I did have interesting experiences."

"You know one of the things I can say is that to get a doctorate — I have my doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT– you have to be willing to work hard and also have to be passionate about what you’re doing."

"Many engineers treat speech like it’s any other signal when it is not. As a professor, I had a couple of Ph.D. students who did dissertations in this area, and I had a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard for a year where I could put all of it together into a solution."

"You have to know it’s your calling because it’s not easy in this area particularly when most of the people around you don’t look like you. You will run into hostility. There will be people who think you should not be there, and I had my share of experiences like that."

"It’s a little bit embarrassing, but real in the sense that there was no deliberate move towards engineering. In fact, growing up in Nigeria, engineering was often a profession reserved for men and women were steered toward careers in healthcare and medicine."

"There’s an interesting journey to my research. The class that I was struggling with at the undergraduate level was fluid flow. That is one of the core courses in chemical engineering, and I remember leaving it going, “God, thank you and good riddance.”"

"That really got me excited about graduate school and I was attracted to the lab of Dan Hammer, who was interested in understanding how white blood cells — especially neutrophils, which take up pathogens — interact during the body’s inflammation response. I spent my graduate school days trying to understand how to create particles, artificial cells, that could mimic this behavior."

"I first realized I had an aptitude for Math and Science during my high school years at Marine Park JHS, where I was the only Black student enrolled in the Special Progress program. In my senior year of JHS, I won second place in the Science Fair and scored in the 90s on all my Regents and citywide exams."

"I graduated with high honors and passed the exams for all of New York's Technical High Schools but instead of attending those schools, I moved to Cambridge, Mass., to live with my grandparents and attended high school at the Cambridge School of Weston."

"I do not stand here on my own two feet alone. None of us got here by our individual merit alone, whether it be teacher, friends, family, mentors, or role models, we each have one or multiple people to whom we are grateful for making this moment possible."

"Usually, anticipation is a slow burn, but when you’re on stage in heels, under the bright lights, smiling nervously ahead waiting for the emcee to say your name, the anticipation burns hot and fast."

"Although it was my first time at this pageant, I grew up competing in various pageants in Colorado up until I left for college at 15. I had competed twice in Miss Massachusetts USA with disappointing results."

"I grudgingly accepted my unspoken duty to my mom to do this thing that continues to be a significant part of my life for better or worse. She unpacked and furnished my house while I concentrated on adjusting to working remotely for my job I kept from Boston. I employed what felt like grueling levels of self-discipline to prepare for the pageant. After all, I had moved here to pursue business opportunities in pageantry, and wouldn’t the title of Miss Colorado USA be a great foot in the door?"

"I share my story because it’s important that you understand me and the value I place on learning and formal education"

"Earning a PhD from Northwestern was an important milestone in my life. I once stood where you now stand. I know how hard you have worked to get where you are today, and I am impressed by your accomplishments."

"For my science project, I studied how quickly different foods would mold when placed in various locations. At one point, we had stinky, moldy food all over the house. That’s love"

"My mother encouraged me every step of the way and she always believed in me. Her confidence fortified me for decades."

"I figured my clientele might be older and not want to be rotating or stand still for too long"

"That’s why I chose the scanner and it’s been pretty useful."

"Or you can pay good money for really good clothes and keep them for years."

"That wasn’t my best engineering moment"

"You are competing with some wicked smart people from all over the world, literally all over the world. So that is like… the floor as you're going in. Just be very, very mindful of your education."

"That's because you have seven million pounds of thrust that is lifting you off the launch pad"

"You eat just about any type of food that you want,” Higginbotham said. “So my commander, who was a big shrimp guy, had shrimp cocktail at every single meal — breakfast, lunch and dinner."

"And what that means is that we go around the world one time every 90 minutes. And in that 90 minutes, we get to see one sunrise, about 45 minutes and then a sunset. So if you were just to plaster yourself at the window for a full day, you would see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. Pretty cool"

"That singular experience is why you are able to have this conversation with me today. The level of confidence that she had in making that proclamation that I could be an engineer was enough to carry me through. I went from that horribly failed exam to getting an A in the class."

"I was used to kind of being the only girl a lot. I probably did better than most in terms of the cultural shock and not having other women around, but I had to deal with some prejudice as people doubted my capabilities. So, there are always challenges and I don’t think it just being about the color of your skin or your gender."

"I share this story to emphasize the critical importance for us to be socially conscious and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in our solutions."

"The first time I remember being fascinated by space was when I read about how the solar system formed. The fact that it was formed from a giant cloud of gas and dust spewed out by supernovas and it all came together under gravity and made the Sun and all the planets – I thought it was bananas that scientists could figure all that out based on what they can see today. I remember thinking, “That’s really cool that we can know that about space.”"

"We're going to a place that's super cool and is a juicy, juicy science target"

"I was introduced to agriculture while pursuing a college degree in pulp and paper science and technology at North Carolina State University. While a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, I had the opportunity to join the U.S. Department of Agriculture in their efforts to advance agriculture through research, education, and extension."