My Experience as a Woman in STEM

By Sophia Deras, civil engineering major with a minor in geology

I’d imagine I had a similar introduction into the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) world as a lot of other engineering majors. I loved my multiplication worksheets, built the most structurally sound lego towers I could, and tried my hardest to read A Brief History of Time in middle school. My dad was delighted to have a child that he could share his interests with, and so I had the privilege of soldering his projects and scrubbing his new computer parts with toothbrushes from a young age. I was blessed with amazingly supportive parents, and so my toy circuits happily occupied the same shelf as my dolls, and the fact I wore dresses was only an issue if I managed to burn holes in them.

Despite the amount of time I spent with electronics and breadboards, big projects captivated me — skyscrapers, highway overpasses, and mixing concrete for the retaining wall in our backyard. Civil engineering was the obvious career path for a kid that couldn’t keep her hands off the building blocks, but as a senior in high school, I still applied to half the colleges on my list as an actuarial science major. I am not, nor have I ever been, particularly interested in finances or statistics, and so this decision seemed a bit left field to those in my life. Simply put, I thought actuarial science might be a more acceptable major for a woman, and maybe I would be treated better doing that than following my dreams.

My sophomore year of high school, our district received a grant for two drone building kits and software. There were a few upperclassmen interested in the programming, but the team still needed a student devoted to building and repairing the drones themselves, so I volunteered. I spent hours after school constructing the drone, and eventually fixing it after it inevitably crashed into the football field. I taught the other students how to repair it when they were out flying and helped design better landing gear to be 3D printed in place of the original parts. The finished product was something to be proud of, and I was, indeed, very proud. But when the school newspaper came to take photos for an article, another student was pictured with the drone and a shiny screwdriver. I realized the drone club group chat did not include me. And when they took their yearbook picture, I was not there. I saw the treatment I received as a reflection of myself and figured I would be happier as an accountant, or maybe a math teacher.

My parents were able to convince me to apply to UNL and a few other schools as a civil engineering major, and so I started going on college tours my senior year of high school and was shown around various engineering buildings. They would often point out awards from organizations like Aerospace Club or posters with smiling STEM students, and I would wonder if any other women had gone home and cried because their work was left uncredited, or if it was just me. My decision to pursue civil engineering happened at two separate moments. First, I saw a concrete crusher touring a university and fell in love. Then, a family friend told me she was so happy I had the option to study engineering because she had not. Over the course of my freshman year at Nebraska, I fell more and more in love with civil engineering and haven’t doubted my place in STEM since (disregarding the over-dramatic ultimatums after a lower-than-expected quiz score).

As is most definitely clear by now, I love civil engineering. I must admit though, I still believed for a long time after getting to college that every success I experienced, every good grade or well-received paper, was in spite of an essential part of myself. A few months ago, I took an upper-level engineering course I truly enjoyed. One morning, after peeling myself out of bed for a super early 10:30 AM class, I stayed after to ask some questions about a presentation I was poised to give in a few days time. As I packed up my bag, my professor mentioned that I should answer more questions during class, because sometimes he could tell I knew the answer even though I hadn’t raised my hand. I typically would have answered this question with a nod and a ‘thank you for noticing,’ but this morning I was tired, and a bit more honest than usual. I told him he was correct, I often knew the answer but didn’t raise my hand, because it’s difficult to be one of three women in a room full of men. I regretted saying this pretty much immediately, but then my professor said something that left me with a lump in my throat for the rest of the day. “I hadn’t really thought about that. Is there anything I can do to make the conversation better?”

The conversation surrounding women in STEM has already changed so much in just the time between my sophomore year of high school and my sophomore year of college, and the increased maturity as you grow older plays a role in that as well. Now, I feel as though myself and my male classmates have much, much more in common with each other than we have different — we all take an ungodly amount of math classes and our difficulties writing papers bring us together. I see being a woman more as an asset now than anything. It’s a great conversation starter, we tend to be memorable students and employees, and my handwriting is typically the best of my peers. Of course, there are challenges, and I sometimes still feel like that little girl who cried over a school club, but those moments are overshadowed by how much I love what I do.

I really can’t wait for a day when an article with the prompt ‘My experience as a woman in STEM’ seems unnecessary. One day, a blog post like this will feel like a classic tale of walking to school uphill both ways. It will feel dramatized, silly, and very antiquated. I cannot wait for a fresh-faced engineering student to roll her eyes at me when I tell her what it was like ‘back in my day,’ and wonder if I was exaggerating a bit. How do we make it better? Recruit women for STEM majors, hold open and honest college climate conversations with students and faculty and foster a community within the field. There isn’t one perfect route, and a lot of it happens informally during conversations like the one I had with my professor after class, but all we can do is work our hardest to get there.

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