Author Biographies

Vanessa*

Vanessa is a twenty-something engineer. She graduated with a degree from one of the top ten engineering schools. Vanessa works in a multidisciplinary field, and comes into contact with every flavor of engineer, tradespeople, and industrial workers in her day to day work. Vanessa is in a heavily male-dominated field, and has yet to work on a project with another woman at her current position. At the beginning of this blog, she worked as a contracted engineer for industrial plants. She then switched to work directly for a plant where there is much more gender, racial, and religious diversity than anywhere she had contracted. YAY!

Vanessa spends her free time volunteering for the local and engineering community, cooking, going out with friends, crocheting like an old lady, doing side engineering projects, and blogging (obviously).

Ruby*

Ruby is a twenty-something engineer, with a degree from a top-ten engineering university. Ruby works on a small team in a large company in the consumer products field. Ruby has been noted as being diligent and thorough, though admittedly her thoroughness is sometimes taken to an extreme.

Ruby's gender experiences as a female engineer are uncommon. Her team is surprisingly split very evenly between men and women and her company has a number of women in management. For the most part, when Ruby is blogging about being a female engineer, she will not focus on differences between the genders because of this balance in the workplace.

Ruby spends her free time hanging out with friends, dreaming of traveling, volunteering, learning new programming/stats/engineering skills, and working on a number of publications. Ruby also has a few domestic hobbies, which are total guilty pleasures including knitting and cleaning her place until it shines. She also has an apron with cats on it, which she refuses to wear around anyone but her closest friends.

Anne*

Valerie*

Valerie is a twenty-something engineer, who already has her PhD from a top ranked University and now works Valerie works in research and development. While she has spent the majority of her career to date in academia, she has also dabbled in consumer product development. 

Outside of the office, Valerie spends her free time creating art, playing music, competing in epic scrabble battles, and exercising. She is engaged to another crazy smart woman, and is excited to start their life together. 

* Because the contributors to this blog (us) would like to keep on engineering at the jobs that they enjoy, efforts towards maintaining anonymity will be taken. Therefore all names used in this blog are pseudonyms, some scenarios are tweaked to remove identifying factors, and some details are removed entirely from the posts. In all cases, though, the anecdote(s) we tell will remain as close to the reality as possible in order to convey the truth of the world of engineering from our perspective.