Women in Engineering; the perspective of a Duke engineering professor and a NC State freshman

On Friday, March 5th, we had the privilege of talking to mechanical engineering professor Dr. Sophia Santillan, as well as to Ilena Johnson, current NC State Freshman studying electrical engineering. Read on to find out about their insights into this field which still has a huge gender imbalance!

To start off, we asked our speakers to describe their focus fields and any ongoing or past projects they participated in.

• Dr. Santillan did research in nonlinear systems, the bending of structures and how their morphing can be used to an advantage. She loved doing this because it got her both theoretical and practical experience. She was solving equations numerically and compared it to data she collected in the lab.

• Ilena is currently a member of the underwater robotics team at NC State. She is part of the electrical team. Their robot is supposed to detect where a certain beeping sound is coming from underwater and go to the spot where it’s coming from. She is also pursuing an internship with the Applied Physics Lab, which is very exciting.

Next, we asked them about their proudest accomplishments (we know, we don't ask any easy questions).

• For Dr. Santillan, getting her PhD was her proudest accomplishment. It was a long haul and it took her many years. She struggled sometimes because when writing a Dissertation it’s a very self motivated thing. Sometimes she felt like she didn’t make enough progress, but she always kept her goal in mind and how valuable it would be.

• Although she's only 18, Ilena's biggest accomplishment is opening up the East Robotics Team to more people. When she joined in 2018, they only had 20 people. Now it’s much bigger because they did a lot of outreach, and there's also an equal gender balance which is a great accomplishment. Robotics is why she became an engineer in the first place. She thought it was so cool how you could just show up and immediately get hands on experience and work on something important. Hands on experience is certainly very important, and a lot of colleges are also leaning on that now. You are very likely to find an internship at NC state if you try to find one.

We were also interested in knowing when our speakers developed an interest in engineering, and what drove them to continue their study.

• Dr. Santillan was really inspired by Movies like Apollo 13. She said that was the first time she felt really inspired by engineering, because there was a crisis in space and they just put a bunch of people and materials and sent them into space and told them to figure it out. She also always loved tinkering with things in the house as a child, but never realized that what she was doing is actually engineering. She used to make alarm systems from her toys so she would know when her sister entered her room, and she also tinkered with the light switch so her sister couldn’t turn it on every morning and wake her up (it worked, but she advises not to mess with electricity). She was always a math child, and while a lot of engineering is just applied math, there are also many engineers who are not into the math aspect of it, but they still build and design amazing things. She actually got a double major in undergrad in math and engineering. She originally thought she was going to become a professional piano player!

• Ilena thought that she was going to go to music school and become a professional jazz musician, but for whatever reason, she decided to join the east robotics team in 10th grade and she really loved it. Why? Because that was the place where all the problems were getting solved. It was the place where those people went who were going to solve the big problems of the future. That’s what engineering is all about- you are faced with a problem which seems so convoluted and complicated- like a power grid that is outdated, or our dependence on fossil fuels, but that’s where engineers come in. Once she was sucked into this world of problem solving, she couldn’t get out of it.

These are some misconceptions and surprising facts that they had when they began studying engineering:

• Dr Santillan noted that a lot of people are interested in fields that will help others, like doctors or humanitarian work, however people don’t realize how much power you have to change the world and help others by being an engineer. Only one example would be designing more environmentally friendly machines and structures.

• Similarly, Ilena thought that engineering was all about how car engines work, which it is, but it’s also such a broad field. It involved thermodynamics, and fluids and materials, and so much more. Another thing: STEM and research in general is surprisingly political. To elaborate, she is pursuing an internship doing research at the applied physics lab, which is being funded by the American government, so all of her work needs to be somewhat aligned with the interest of the American government. You need funding and sponsors for most research you do, so their interest are likely to influence your work.

Here is how interdisciplinary work influenced Ilena's life:

• "All of my intro to engineering classes so far have been all about the importance of interdisciplinary thinking. The Engineering program at NC State is very focused on this- the business aspect of engineering, for example, and we had an entire week here we just made resumes. I’m an electrical engineering major, right? what I’m finding in my underwater robotics team is that computer science is so incredibly important for my work. I need to be able to write code in python, and read someone else’s code and understand it. And we also need to know all the mechanical parts to know how to implement the electrical parts. " (paraphrased)

An example of a challenge that Dr. Santillan had to overcome:

• "Changes are very scary. I made a decision a while ago to go from college teaching to high school teaching, and it felt like I was leaving behind the college academia track forever. While I loved teaching high school engineering and math, I was lucky to get a position at Duke and I thankfully was able to continue my college academia career." (paraphrased)

Dr. Santillan also shared about her work on the Bass Connections Project:

• Bass Connections project teams bring together faculty, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduates and external partners to tackle complex societal challenges in interdisciplinary research teams. She is developing a math program for middle school girls. Dr. Santillan is very passionate about making engineering a more inclusive field. She also stressed that just because someone is not good at math, doesn't mean that they can't learn to become good at it.

She also published an article called Correlation between homework solution website use and course performance. Here are her results:

• She was noticing that a lot of students came into class with the same answers to problems, and making the same common errors. They were even asking her to explain problems they wrote on their homework that they didn’t actually do, but just looked it up online. Since she really wanted homework to be a place where her students practiced actually applying the theory she learned in class, she started keeping track of who was actually trying to do the problems on their own, who was not doing anything at all and who was looking things up online. She then compared that data to the student’s academic performance. The metric she used was exam scores. What she found was that, unsurprisingly, the people who perhaps didn’t do everything right but made a genuine effort experienced a greater improvement and success in class than those who just looked stuff up online. One important lesson is that simply reading about theory is often not enough, you have to practice applying it, which is just what engineering is for- to use theory to construct something useful. She now writes all of her homework on her own. As a professor, she also added that curiosity and morality were two attributes she thinks every good engineer should have.

One thing which Dr. Santillan wishes schools would teach more:

• Statistics. She actually got an undergraduate degree and an engineering degree without ever taking a stats class, which is very strange. But, it’s just so applicable to any kind of research and even in everyday life. You need to know the basics of statistics to know if your findings are relevant and how to interpret your data.

What is it like being a first-year engineering student online for Ilena?

• She misses the campus a lot. She lived on campus for the whole 2 weeks, and it was great, 10/10, but right now she’s just chilling at her house. She is very much looking forward to going to the library again and starting undergraduate research, which was suspended and is recently opening up again. One very interesting thing about NC state is that they have this library robot which gets books for you, and you can watch it work. It’s seriously very cool.

When we asked Ilena about future career hopes, this was her answer:

• There were many areas she would like to work in. A company of conductors that used Gallium Nitrate. There is this big NC based company that does work with semiconductors, and they’re looking to make innovative semiconductors, but now they’re experiencing many challenges with their production. She might also go into graduate school. However, there are so many interesting opportunities out there for an electrical engineer.

Here are some tips that our guest speakers have for those who will graduate soon and maybe even plan on studying engineering:

• Ilena would like everyone to know, especially East kids who are always stressed about their achievements, that it's not the end of the world if they don’t get into their dream school. If you go to a community college for 2 years and then transfer to a 4 year school, that's fine too. She's actually going to take an intro physics class at Wake Tech because they do a better job at explaining things than at NC State. Oh, and spend a lot of time on your essays. They’re very important.

• Similarly, Dr. Santillan pointed out that something which is unique to engineering schools across the US is that their curriculum and teaching practices are reviewed by a board and they are all held to the same standard. Wherever you decide to get an engineering degree, you are going to get a quality education.