Problem Solvers: 15 Innovative Women Engineers and Coders

Copyright © 2022 by Patricia Jedrziewski Hoover

All rights reserved.

Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-64160-677-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022938847

Cover design and illustrations: Sadie Teper

Interior design: Nord Compo

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

For my parents,

the best role models anyone could ever ask for

Contents

Introduction

Part I Against the Odds

1 Gabriela A. González: Find a Way

2 Sue Black: Take Control

3 Noramay Cadena: Take a Chance

Part II Cutting-Edge Tech

4 Karmella Haynes: Change the World

5 Eva Saravia: Face Life's Challenges

6 Lola Eniola-Adefeso: Set Your Own Path

Part III Leading the World

7 Danielle Merfeld: Just Ask

8 Meredith Westafer: It's Great to Be You

9Kara Sprague: Pivot

Part IV Hackers and AI

10 Parisa Tabriz: Princess Power

11 Natalie Rusk: Try It and See

12 Sophia Velastegui: Keep Moving Forward

Part V Rockets and Space

13 Swati Mohan: Persevere

14 Victoria Garcia: Speak Up

15 Shayna Begay: Stand Strong

Appendixes

A So You Want to Be an Engineer or a Coder?

B Types of Engineers

C Cool Programming Jobs

D Books and Movies

E All About Advanced Degrees

F How to Program the Great Pyramid

G On Writing Problem Solvers

Introduction

Hey there, and thank you for reading Problem Solvers: 15 Innovative Engineers and Coders! I’ve had a ton of fun writing this book, and I’m super excited to share it with you. But who am I and why am I qualified to write this book? Well, I’m a writer. And an engineer. Turns out you can be both, though I never realized this when I was younger.

Growing up, the first thing I wanted to be was a Jedi. After all, who wouldn’t want to be able to travel in space, use telekinesis, and do cool mind tricks? But seeing as how that wasn’t going to happen (I tried—trust me), I spent my summers reading science fiction and fantasy books and teaching myself to program in BASIC on my Commodore 64. For those who don’t know, that’s a really old home computer—one of the first and, in my opinion, definitely the most awesome. I always wanted the Atari system, but my dad didn’t want me playing video games all day, even way back then. But don’t worry, I still managed to play plenty of video games on the Commodore 64. Q*Bert, Jumpman, and Castle Wolfenstein were some of my favorites. I still manage to play quite a few video games these days, and Q*Bert remains one of my favorites.

As for my family, my dad was a pilot and an aeronautical engineer, and my mom was a secretary turned supermom who used power tools and built shelves and never let anything stand in the way of what she wanted to accomplish. In short, I had two pretty great role models, and I grew up loving math and science and building and creating.

What I didn’t do when I was younger? Write books. I learned early on that books were things other people wrote, so I contented myself reading about worlds created by J. R. R. Tolkien, Roger Zelazny, David Eddings, and Isaac Asimov, to name a handful.

In school, I straddled the line of nerdiness and the popular crowd by spending my days as captain of the varsity cheerleading squad and my nights watching reruns of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. I took computer science and astronomy in high school and snuck off to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to watch IMAX movies every chance I got. I took profile tests to see what my perfect career path would be, and given my love of fixing things and my skills at math and programming, engineering seemed a great choice.

When it came to what kind of engineer I wanted to be, it was always an aerospace engineer. My dad was an aeronautical engineer, and I was fascinated by outer space and the idea of exploring strange new worlds (I blame it on Star Trek). But then, during my junior year in high school, the space shuttle Challenger blew up, killing all seven people on board. I remember watching the explosion while on a ski trip in Vermont. It was so cold that day that everyone was hanging out inside the lodge, and the news kept showing it happen, over and over again. It was horrific, and the tragedy had a pretty detrimental effect on the current aerospace market. I decided that possibly aerospace wasn’t the best choice at that time. Instead, I headed off to a college called Virginia Tech where I enrolled in computer engineering.

Computer engineering as a degree was pretty new back then. Of engineering fields, it was the one least represented by females. I was one of four women in the entire class (which was only about forty kids). I took a combination of engineering and computer science courses. I wrote lines and lines of computer code. I wrote video games for my class projects (look for me on Scratch, at https://scratch.mit.edu/users/triciajh/. You can find my games there). And I loved every minute of it. Coding was like problem solving to the extreme. I loved trying new ideas, testing them, and then refining my programs to get them to work. And at the end of four years, I earned my bachelor’s degree in computer engineering.

Then, in a strange turn of events, I decided at the end of four years that I wanted to be an archaeologist (just like Lara Croft and Indiana Jones). I wanted to discover things like King Tut’s tomb and hidden cities under the Roman Forum. I’d seen the King Tut treasures the first time they came through America back in 1977, and I’d loved ancient history ever since. So I stuck around Virginia Tech for an extra year and earned a bachelor of arts degree in history. Ancient history, specifically. I loved trying to unlock those mysteries of the past.

But then, once again, things changed, because I figured out engineering might provide better as a career path for the future. I applied to graduate school and continued on at Virginia Tech to get my master’s degree in electrical engineering, specializing in digital design.

I graduated, moved from Virginia to Austin, Texas, and got a great job at Motorola designing computer chips. I worked on designs for video communications systems and memory controllers. I was able to live temporarily in Chicago for a year, working at Motorola headquarters. Then, after seven years at Motorola, I switched to Intel, where I continued designing computer chips. The chips I worked on when I was at Intel went into the earliest smartphones and e-book readers like the Kindle. It was exciting cutting-edge technology, and I was thrilled to be a part of it.

Engineering was great. I had friends at work. I enjoyed my job. It paid well. But after fifteen years as an electrical engineer designing computer chips I went through another turning point. I’d just given birth to my second kid, and I wanted to try something different than engineering, but I wasn’t sure what. First, I learned to solve the Rubik’s Cube (you should learn to do the same—people will think you’re super smart; there’s a video of me doing this on YouTube). Then I memorized a really long poem called Kubla Khan by Samuel Coleridge (impressive at parties; there’s also a video of me doing this on YouTube). And then I got a crazy idea. I decided to write a book. (There is no video of me doing this on YouTube.)

But here’s the thing: I was working full-time engineering, and I had two young kids at home (a newborn and a three-year-old). Where would I find the time to write a book? I was washing bottles and changing diapers, all while trying to get a promotion at work. Does it sound impossible? Does it sound like I’d have no spare time whatsoever? That wasn’t the case at all. I just had to reassess my life to find the time I needed.

I gave up television. All of a sudden, in the evenings after the kids’ bedtimes, I had a good two hours on my hands, and I used it faithfully each night to write my first story. Four pages at a time, and after three months, I had a completed first draft. It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you chip away at it a little bit at a time. In case you are interested, my first book is called The Emerald Tablet, and it’s about kids with telepathic and telekinetic powers—the exact powers I wanted when I was younger! It’s the first book of a trilogy about kids from continents hidden under the ocean called The Forgotten Worlds.

People tend to think of engineering and writing as totally different fields, but they have a lot in common. Getting through engineering school requires discipline and organization. Writing a book requires discipline and organization. Designing computer chips takes quite a bit of creativity. And yes, we all know writing a book takes creativity. Computer code is a lot like a book. You write. You test. You revise. You test some more, and you keep on revising until you get it right. Sure, you might find bugs, but no computer chip is perfect. Neither is any book.

So that gets us to here, with me writing this book featuring fifteen amazing female engineers and coders. This book was like a dream come true for me, like a melding of my two worlds. For each and every woman featured in this book, I was able to interview them on a one-on-one basis. I connected with them on so many levels. Being a working mom juggling all life’s day-to-day activities while trying to stay in shape, managing a house, and still getting my job responsibilities done. Learning how to say no and to delegate and to lead teams. It was like I’d found my people once again. It was truly an honor to interview these women, and I’m thrilled to have the privilege of sharing their stories with you.

This book features the stories of fifteen women who have defied the odds, who have found a way to attend college even when there was no money, who have broken out of abusive relationships, who have spoken up for themselves even when no one would listen. These women are on the cutting edge of technology. From renewable energy to cancer research, these women are changing the world. They’re making it a better place for all of us. And they are paving the path for more female engineers and coders by being amazing role models and mentors. I hope you find as much inspiration in their stories as I have.

Gabriela A. González:

Find a Way

Have you ever been told you can’t do something? How many times does it take to be told you can’t before you start to believe it? And why do these voices sometimes come from the most trusted sources, our teachers and counselors and parents? For Dr. Gabriela A. González, these voices were an integral part of her life. She was told over and over that she wasn’t good enough. That she should give up on her dreams.

What if you didn’t have to listen to the voices or believe them? What if you knew there were wonderful options out there for you? What if never considering yourself good at math and science didn’t hold you back from being an engineer? So often the study of engineering is reserved for the kids who are good at math and science, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Many boys consider STEM fields because it’s a known and encouraged option for them. But for the vast majority of girls, it’s only the ones who have been told by teachers that they should consider engineering who go on to pursue it. Dr. Gabriela A. González is on a mission to change this.

Gabriela was born in Mexico and lived there until she was 13, but then her mother divorced her dad and moved with her five children to Harlingen, Texas, a town in the Rio Grande Valley near the border. While in Mexico, Gabriela’s family was considered middle class. The schools provided a good education, Gabriela worked hard and excelled, and she planned to go to college. This was a true possibility for her.

However, her college dreams were shattered with the move to the United States. Money was scarce. The family was on welfare, lived in public housing, and worked hard to scrape by. And as immigrants from Mexico to southern Texas, Gabriela felt discriminated against, even though she had the same skin color as her peers. There were defined classes in society, and in these classes, Gabriela and her family were at the bottom.

Gabriela’s mother sold everything they owned and moved the family to Washington a couple of years later. Here, Gabriela, her mother, and her siblings picked crops in the fields to get by. Gabriela babysat and found a job in a daycare. She continued with school and worked when not studying. The family lived in public housing and lived off welfare and food stamps. College was becoming a distant