I am a Design Engineer for the C-130, which is a cargo plane manufactured by Lockheed Martin. The C-130 has been around for over 50 years, so sometimes the people who buy the planes want to upgrade it. The upgrades range from newer and stronger wings to more technologically advanced electronic systems (kind of like upgrading from a VCR to a DVD player).

I thought engineering sounded interesting, so I joined an organization called TAME (Texas Alliance for Minorities in Engineering) when I was in middle and high school. We had a few competitions that really sparked my interest. One of them was an egg drop contest. We were supposed to design the lightest as well as the smallest container that would keep an unboiled egg from cracking when it was dropped from different heights. It was interesting to see not only which designs worked, but we would also try to predict which ones would work before the egg was dropped. It was a lot of fun speculating what would happen and then when our predictions were wrong, we would try to figure out why it was wrong.

I really enjoy being an engineer because I am constantly learning about how and why things work the way they do. There is so much to learn and I know that I'm just at the tip of the iceberg. At work, I am surrounded by people with many years of experience, so it is interesting to hear how things used to be at Lockheed Martin compared to now, as well as the way the C-130 has evolved over the years.

My family left their homeland, Vietnam, when my older sister was about 1 month old. They settled in Texas, which is where I was born and raised until I left for college in Georgia. In Texas, I lived with my grandmother, aunt, dad and sister. My sister has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. She writes computer code for programs that her company wants to use.