"What's engineering?" and he goes "everything." and I was like...
"what? You need to be more specific here, what is it." and he goes "everything."
and it wasn't until years later that I realized that's a fairly accurate answer.
I'm Shalene Theao Smith and I'm a Mechanical Engineer for HEXBUG.
The engineering mentality, the mind that oh you look at something and you see how it should work
or you look at it and you're like "whoa how does this work? How can I design this better?"
kind of came later in life for me. I grew up with three brothers who were engineers, and I still
had no idea what engineering was until I was in college and going to school for graphic design.
My brother who was studying electrical engineering was like "you're really good at math, and and I
think you ought to look into engineering, because you'd be really good at it, you liked science
and everything" I was like "but I've always wanted to be an artist, Brandon". So then I
went and talked to the engineering department chair at the college, and I said you know look
this is kind of my history I've been in special ed I'm good at math but I've struggled with it
in the past but I have an art background do you think I'm getting it over my head if I do switch.
And he said "honestly you're going to have a little bit of an advantage because you're
going to be able to see the aesthetics, and the function and marry them together
in a way that most engineers can't". Because most engineers tend to say a function, function,
function, and then we have art people over here going "no it has to be pretty,
it has to look good" and we're like "no, it has to work". So having that background has been able to
really make my job work better. I design toys...
for kids basically, I'm Santa's elf. Right now, my projects are completely consumed by JUNKBOTS.
The art department will hand me a design or a rendering of what they want a character
or a robot to look like, and then I'll go through and make it function, make it moldable,
and make it so it can actually be used as a toy. A lot of people who are in engineering
will come back and say oh I played with this STEM toy, or this, or this or this,
or "I was in robotics and I got to do this and build this and everything".
And I realized that I had signs from when I was a kid that I could have really enjoyed engineering,
but I wasn't looking for them and it wasn't available to me in the way that it was so
much. Even though I had you know three brothers who all went into engineering,
it just wasn't a thing that even ever occurred to me.
And I think that's why I kind of wanted to get into designing toys specifically.
I said all the way through college you know I want to go design toys I want to design STEM
toys because I want to be able to give especially little girls the opportunity that I didn't get.
Just... It just wasn't... We had barbies so I want to make sure that you know, my daughter gets that
chance so that she can choose if that's what she wants to do or if she wants to
do something else that's great too. We all have different things to bring to the table.
It's important that I think that girls have the opportunity to get into engineering. Because
it is a mainly male field and that's fine I don't have anything against them at all. It's just
we need more of the viewpoint from different perspectives because without that perspective
you may be missing a solution that you just can't see. But you know you have the mind of an engineer
when you're looking... When you take a break from studying for a final and you go to a park just
to let your brain just melt a little bit and not think about studying and you look at the corkscrew
on the slide. And you're sitting there trying to figure out the calculations of that helix and
you know comparing it to a spring. You know that you're an engineer when all these little things
that you've learned are now applied to things that you went "huh wait this isn't what I thought
it was any more". I'm Shalene Smith, and it's my pleasure to celebrate engineering week with you.