SWE's site profiles successful women. Tara Teich works at LucasArts creating Star Wars video games. Her first assignment: the Star Trek: Armada II game. She comments:
My parents didn't really get the game, but they loved seeing my name in the credits.
More recently, Teich hand her hand in The Force Unleashed. Her specialty is game play and artificial intelligence, basically Tara and her team are the brains behind the characters in the game.
Katherine Bicer is involved in mechanical and materials engineering, working on engine parts for helicopters like Black Hawks, Seahawks and Apaches. In the military, and with LifeFlight helicopters in civilian life, Katherine points out that "helicopters often mean the difference between life and death."
She knows from personal experience, since her brother was carried by helicopter to a hospital during a life threatening situation. Part of her job is to find materials that can take the heat and stress to enable helicopters to fly higher and faster, getting their occupants there safely.
Judy Lee began with IKEA designing a children's play mat with a team of engineers and product developers, which gave her a chance to use creativity and problem solving skills. She landed at IDEO in Palo Alto, California, an innovative design firm that created Apple's first mouse. There she designed children's toys, pet products and food and drug packaging. She says or her jobs:
I'm surrounded by brilliant people. It doesn't really seem like work. It's just plain fun!
The Women's Engineering Society in the United Kingdom has been inspiring technical women since 1919. They have a pamphlet on how to and how not to connect with younger children to expose them to the world of science and engineering.
They remind members that "preparation and presentation is key as a poor student experience can have a more damaging impact on the perception of engineers and engineering than no contact at all." They also point out the differences in using mature or younger role models to present science and engineering to students in secondary schools.
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