Girls on Teams going to Engineering

[Mikell Taylor]

1) What made get involved in FIRST
My team started when I was a junior in high school. My physics teacher asked me if I wanted to "meet with some Ohio State engineers about doing some sort of engineering project." I said, "Sure." It's been downhill ever since.

2) How long have you been involved in FIRST
Two years on a high school team, one year off, three years mentoring and volunteering.

3) What college(s) did you apply to/get accepted to
Applied to Olin College, MIT, CalTech, Case Western, Harvey Mudd College, and Ohio State. Got in to all of them. About to graduate from Olin College and head into industry.

4) Are you planning on going into the engineering field why or why not?
Yes, because I adore it. I want to keep doing robots. Every time I have to give a presentation on a project I've done, I'm reminded of how much I love talking about what I'm doing, and that inspires me to keep going.

5) Also why do you think it's important for women to go into engineering, and maybe share some personal experience working alongside engineers.
Women offer a different perspective on teams (and engineering is inherently team-based) -- they suggest ideas differently, they make different connections between ideas, and so on. The diversity of perspective is important. It's very important for design, too -- there's an all-male project team at my school doing a project for Motorola this year, and they're using GPS-enabled cell phones. During a design review presentation, they talked about how they had trouble sometimes with good reception in their pockets, but how since most people wear phones on clips on their belts, it would be okay. One of the women sitting in on the presentation asked, "Will it work in my purse?" They had no answer -- it hadn't even occurred to them to think of it.

Personal experiences? Though my work experiences tend not to reflect this, my school (Olin College of Engineering) is about 50/50 male/female (intentionally). It's great because you don't *notice* women on teams, or not on teams, or whatever, because the population is pretty much exactly what you encounter in your life. It's only when I leave to go work a job or whatever and I get treated as something weird that it bothers me. I got interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article last semester about my school being 50/50, and what I thought about that, and my answer was, it's nice not being a novelty. The less someone points out how strange it is that I'm a woman who likes science and engineering, the happier I am.