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Q: Can you tell me about your journey as an engineer, and people who have been mentors?

A: I was around engineering things as a child, but I didn't label it as engineering. I love math and science, but I also loved everything else—poetry, reading. The turning point was I always knew I wanted to go to college, but I also knew that I had to pay for college. So when it came to applying for a job, I applied for an engineering fellowship, and you just had to write an essay. 

There was a STEM program for women, so they brought in a bunch of us after our junior year of high school to do research, and I matched with Audrey Levine. The moment I got into her lab, I felt like I belonged. I worked closely with Anne, one of the graduate students in the lab. She was my mentor. She showed me how to do everything in the lab. I wanted to be a graduate student, and hearing her stories made me excited. The people I met there were my contacts. She helped me get my first internship in Virginia. 

After getting into Iowa State, I was thinking about mechanical and aerospace engineering, but after learning more and working in the lab, nothing sounded better than civil and environmental engineering. 

I had to think about what I wanted to do after college. I loved working in a private agency and consulting, but all my role models went to grad school, and it seemed easy to keep going and get scholarships, so that is what I ended up doing in Seattle. 

I finished my master’s, and I was about to take a job in Salt Lake City, but then my faculty member for my PhD was very persuasive and showed me a three-page-long list he made for reasons I should stay. The fact that he invested so much time thinking about it and saw something in me that I would make a good faculty member, even if I didn't see it in myself, made me want to give it a try.  

At a dinner party, I met Marc Edwards, who was working at CU Boulder, and suggested I should come out here for a job. When this position opened up, he emailed me and said “You should apply,” so again it was like a mentor giving me the push to apply, because I don't think I would’ve done it myself. This happened when I had been a PhD student for five months, so I took this application as a practice since I was nowhere close to being done. But then they offered me the job and said they would wait an extra year. So I had to finish my PhD in two-and-a-half years, which was really stressful. And here I am!

I moved from an environmental engineering laboratory to engineering education research. The first year I taught, it was stressful. I had no teaching experience. I went to a weeklong retreat during the summer during my first year, and they showed us how to teach as much as they could for one week. I didn’t know I would love teaching, but I did. I found engineering education research to balance the different aspects of my job.

Q: What challenges have you overcome as a woman in STEM?

A: Isolation. It was the late 1980s, so the school was very male-dominated; less than 10% of students in STEM were women. I took a class about women engineers, and there were about 60 students in my class, and it was nice to know there were women out there also. 

But in my classes, there was one other woman or none. In my dorm, where study groups were formed, there were two other women engineering students. One was my roommate, and she dropped out because of calculus. She left because she got a C and that wasn't good enough for her. The other girl wasn’t there for all the semesters. 

It was isolating because people would start partying on Wednesday, and I would be like, no, I have to study, and I didn’t have a study group while the guys’ floor downstairs had a whole bunch of study groups. 

Some guys were negative. There was an incident where we had to set up a tripod outside, and they set it to their heights, up tall, and I couldn't reach it. They said, “Well you should’ve worn your high heels today,” or just snarky remarks: “It’s so cool you’re an engineer because when your husband gets home from work you can talk to him.” No, dude, I am going to get a job. 

They would just assume you were there to get a husband, so you had to have thick skin. But I think I learned this from my mentors. They were assertive, and my mentor told me a story about there only being one restroom in the whole building for her, and when she brought it up, they just told her to go down from the sixth floor to the second, but she didn’t let down. 

Q: What do you anticipate for the future of CU Engineering?

A: I think it's on the new generation that it's getting better, slowly, evening out the work field and industry within specific fields. Engineering will be more about people and less about stuff. Why do we want technology, and thinking about the next step? What can we, engineers, do for society and the environment? Sometimes there is a disconnect between hard work and realizing our limitations. If I look at someone and assume they need X or Y, think about why they would need that. Let's ask them, and listen to them genuinely. Things would work better if we worked with communities and different professions. 

About the Author

I am Yamelit Medina-Lopez, and I am a third-year majoring in Engineering Plus with an emphasis in mechanical engineering and a concentration in STEM education. I chose the Engineering Plus program because of the supportive community and all the great professors. When I learned about the opportunity to interview a woman professor in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, I was really excited to be able to talk to Professor Bielefeldt and learn more about her and her story.