[Mikell Taylor]

My parents decided before I was born that I was going to be an astronaut and raised me accordingly (the only Cabbage Patch Kid I was allowed to have was an astronaut). At some point around middle school or freshman year of high school I found out that most astronauts are engineers, so I figured that meant I had to be an engineer too. I went through a phase of wanting to be a chemical engineer (because I loved my chemistry class) but when a FIRST team got started my junior year of high school, suddenly it was nothing but robots for me. Ever since then, even though I changed my interest in majors a couple times and ended up in electrical engineering with a bunch of mechanical coursework, my internships, projects, and my jobs have all been focused around robots. Because... they're just cool!

I should mention that starting in seventh grade, I went to an all-girls school. Because of that, and because my parents had never implied that it should be otherwise, I guess while I knew on some level that it was unusual for me to have the interests that I did, I never really questioned whether or not engineering was "for girls". At my school it was really more that I was just a geek. Of course, once I got involved with FIRST, I found that 99% of our mentors were male, and experienced a fair amount of sexism first-hand at the FRC regionals and nationals (it was only nationals then) that I attended. And I'm not saying that to hate on FIRST -- there's been plenty of sexism in college and in my career as well. I'm just pointing out that until I was thrown in with a bunch of male engineers, my gender was largely a non-issue.