Please watch brilliant talk by Patricia Galloway, where she shares how she thought she couldn’t be an engineer and how she almost didn’t become one.
She thought about herself as a creative, people person. And if it wasn’t for the school career event, she might have never notice how creative engineering can be.
So if you are still wondering if you should come to our Open Day on 10th March – this is your cue.
She touched on key points of the problem – the shortage of engineers and why girls don’t ‘do engineering’:
- Do I look like a geek? – she counters it, saying she wears high heels 85% of the time at her job.
- I want a job that helps people – she points out that engineers are the ones that not only make our everyday life possible, they also find ways to deliver luxuries we take for granted, like clean water to underdeveloped or disaster struck parts of the world.
- Public perception – can’t see past the brain of engineers, don’t see them as compassionate human, who travel to remote places and save people from disasters.
- Boring job – she mentioned she had opportunity to travel to South Pole – and that it was cool. Like, minus 50 degrees cool. But she got to breath the cleanest air on the planet.
- Are engineers good leaders? – she brings out statistic that more than 30% of CEOs of well known companies have engineering degree – Apple, Google, Facebook, Walmart,
- Discouragement – her career advisor, teachers and even her grandma kept asking her: isn’t engineering a man’s job? Which only made her more determined.
Geek stereotypes and a misunderstanding of what engineers really do has contributed to the very real, world-wide shortage of engineers. Engineer Patricia Galloway shares the list of the world’s most serious challenges, poses that engineers are the best qualified to fix them, and shares how the media and changing public perception might be good for the engineering profession and even better for the world.
Did you ever have a dream that was so far from your reality that you never thought it would come true? Patricia Galloway did. Because she came from an impoverished part of the country and a very poor family, she never believed her dreams could ever come true. When she got depressed, her mother would always say, “You can do anything if you really want to. Don’t let anyone tell you no!” She kept repeating that phrase, and so with full confidence that she could do anything, Patricia conquered the world in ways she could have never imagined.
Her fairy tale story came true—so much so that she has sat around the table with presidents and dignitaries, travelled around all seven continents, and climbed up the ladders of success by shattering the glass ceiling. Her adventure stories will excite you, make you laugh and might even make you cry, but hopefully they will reinforce how important it is to communicate to others what it is you want to do, stay committed to your goals and have the confidence that you can do anything. The ending to the fairy tale story of the little girl is that when she grows up she never wants to go to sleep, because her reality is finally more exciting than her dreams.