How did you know engineering was right for you?

First off, way to go for thinking ahead and looking forward toward college! You are getting a head start and because of that you have a great opportunity to really look into options and explore what you are interested in. You can do this by looking around the area you live in for activities that spark your interest. Sometimes they will offer things at your schools or libraries. I know where I am my work goes to libraries throughout the year and gives engineering talks to groups of kids about Jr. High age and then we do bridge building or other contests. Look for these types of activities in your area to explore engineering, or other fields you may be interested in.

Secondly, there is NO wrong choice, especially at this point in the game. You still have some time to decide what you want to do. Even when you get into college once you choose your major you still can switch it, many people do. Be willing to take different classes that you are interested in and that seem like they may be fun. Even if they don’t end up being part of your career they may just lead to fun knowledge that you have. My brother took a rock climbing class in college just as an elective. Now rock climbing is his favorite hobby and he goes all over the world to climb! Don’t look at a choice and think that it could be the wrong one. Look at a choice and think of what could the potential experience be like.

You will decide what career you want to go into. The big thing is you want to find something that peaks your interest and makes you excited. My big message to you is keep exploring! Look for opportunities to practice and learn skills so you can begin to see what you really enjoy.

If you are in 7th grade, you definitely have plenty of time to figure out what you want to do. I think I changed my mind multiple times between 7th grade and going into college. I actually wanted to go into the medical field until my Senior year of high school. However, after taking Calculus and Physics I realized I really enjoyed solving problems using math and science but I did not enjoy memorizing things (going to med school is a lot of memorization!). I started to become confused about what to do since I had always thought of going into the medical field. I started to think about potentially going into architecture since I liked art and even majoring in Spanish since I enjoyed learning the language. However, after talking to different people I started to narrow in on engineering specifically mechanical engineering since it allowed me to use math, science and problem-solving skills.

I would suggest taking the time to figure out what interests you and talking to and shadowing people who are in different fields that relate to your interests. The more experiences you have will help you understand what you are interested in. I would suggest looking if there are any extracurricular activities that will help expose you to engineering as well. However, I would not worry too much about narrowing down exactly what you want to do. You have plenty of time to be able to tweak that as you learn more about the different fields. I know people who have gotten engineering degrees but have gone on to work in fields like marketing, finance, law, and medicine. An engineering degree gives you a good foundation if it is something you are interested in. I don't think there is a wrong choice when it comes to picking a major or career and by picking something doesn't mean it is the only thing you can ever do. Once you get into college you can start doing internships to get exposure to the different opportunities that are out there. These will allow you to really find out what you like and don't like about a career.

I would highly suggest learning as much as you can about what interests you and this will help you better understand what you want to do.

Engineering is a broad category with many different opportunities from building bridges to writing software. Today, there are many more engineering fields than when I went through school, so it’s a continuously changing landscape. Since you have time, I suggest a few ways you can explore your options: look for summer camps that offer engineering or problem solving sessions, look for adults who do engineering and ask them about their job, read about careers. Know that many colleges also have introductory courses that take you through the different fields and help you focus your interests. In the meantime, I encourage you to keep up with your interest in math, science, and tinkering…it will lead to many wonderful opportunities!

I didn’t really know engineering was right for me until college, but that was before the time of having great resources on the internet and STEM activities in schools. My suggestions to you:

• Do some internet research about engineering work.
• Visit with different types of engineers to understand better what they do in their daily jobs.
• Go to career fairs that are science and engineering based.
• Participate in any STEM activities sponsored by your school system or in your area. Especially look for activities featured around E-week in February.
• Review information on the Engineer Girl website.
• Talk to your guidance counselor about your career choices.

First, props to you for starting in 7th grade to explore what you would like to study in college! I personally didn't learn about engineering until 11th grade.

To figure out if engineering is a good fit for you, I suggest searching for local STEM programs that you can participate in. Our local Women's Transportation Seminar (WTS) Philadelphia chapter runs a program called TransportationYOU that meets every other month to cover a different career in transportation through presentations from professionals and hands-on activities. The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) also has a free program that you can join right now called SWENext! On their website, you can search for upcoming outreach events in your area where you can also further explore engineering.

These programs not only let you explore engineering but also connect you with women already in the field to see if you can envision their career as your future career! Through the Engineering Camp I visited in 11th grade, I got to meet women in all different Engineering fields (mechanical, aerospace, environmental, civil, etc.) and performed different labs in each field which helped me decide that Civil Engineering would be the best major for me. I have always loved problem-solving paired with math and science and that is essentially what I do every day at work as a structural engineer!

I knew that engineering was right for me in two ways: 1) I found the classes and labs in my engineering discipline (materials science) interesting and enjoyable, and 2) I truly enjoyed my first job working as a summer intern in the field (and following internships too!). My advice for you, at a young age, is to try shadow engineers. Then when the time is appropriate, try to get summer jobs in the fields of engineering that sound interesting to you. I believe these should help you determine if engineering might be right for you. Enjoying your college classes should help too. Good luck!

I have been delighted to find that every field offers at least 50 types of distinct job options, and many (like mine: civil engineering) offer hundreds if not thousands. So there are wonderful positions available for you within each, especially if you do well in school and extracurricular activities, and end up with lots of job offers. I had no idea what I wanted to study, but I was good at math and science and simply wanted to help the world, so I went into civil engineering (which is the most “public” or community-focused of the engineering disciplines). While I was an undergraduate, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I was so fortunate that one day I noticed a scholarship for transportation studies in civil engineering. I had had just one class in that topic area (it was all UC Berkeley offered undergraduates 30 years ago), and it was not focused on areas of strong interest to me (interchange design). But I got to thinking about all the diversity of disciplines within transportation, and I was hooked! One can do travel demand forecasting or transport policy, aviation logistics or airport design, transit system design or transit operations, safety engineering or air quality, pavement design or vehicle communications management, intersection design or signal systems management, spatial statistics or constrained optimization, machine learning for big transportation data sets or vehicle positioning technologies, infrastructure management or personnel management, drones or tolling theory, transportation economics or behavioral data acquisition and analysis, network design, or... The list goes on and on.

Over your lifetime, you will be exposed to more and more work options and more and more opportunity, for management and bigger decision-making. It is part of life, and you should not worry about being pigeon-holed early on. Just be sure to get a technical undergraduate degree that offers you choice as you age, and I bet you will be happy with your professional options! (Remember that you can always shift gears between undergraduate and graduate work. And you can always get two undergraduate degrees, if you want to give yourself more academic balance and/or easier transitions into graduate school and/or jobs.)

You figure out if you like something or not by trying it out. Participate in science fairs or math olympiads and try everything out and if you feel like engineering is something you want to do, go for it. But always remember, if at some point you don't want to do it, you can choose not to and try something new. We live in a great time where technology has enabled us to do whatever we want and whatever we want to be. You have a long time to explore and learn and figure it out.