My name is Caitlin Kalinowski.
I never fully understood what engineering was until I became an engineer.
What it is is solving new problems by building something.
That's it.
I used to work on laptops,
and now I work in VR.
In VR we have an artificial world.
I'm very excited about the future of VR.
Creativity will be at the forefront of who is successful.
As a kid I was just curious. I just wanted to make things.
I think I made a nose warmer, which probably is a little bit hilarious.
That sort of thing is just more just exploration of how things work.
When I was five years old, my parents got me a remote control car,
and I was so excited.
What I really wanted to do was understand how it worked.
And so I took it apart.
My parents were so confused.
When I was really young, you would just get
a little set of LEGO bricks and just play and create.
One of the things that was really important about LEGO sets
is the instructions show you how to think in three dimensions, and so you have to
look at a two dimensional picture and create a three dimensional object.
That is a massively important skill in mechanical engineering,
and it's something that we do every day.
I wish somebody had just explained what engineering was.
It wasn't until
I showed some aptitude for science and math that I started to hear
that word much, much older.
And I finally in college, got to start taking engineering
classes and understand what it was.
But it wasn't until I actually started working that I started to solve problems
that no one had ever solved before, which for me
is the essence of the excitement of what engineering is.
I walked into a cafe and every single laptop that
the seven or eight people were using, I'd been on the design team for.
And it was just one of the coolest feelings.
Every emotion that you feel in the normal world is heightened in VR,
and when you're in VR and you turn left or turn right, what you see changes,
so it feels like you're really there.
I hope someday that I'll get a chance to go to Machu Picchu.
But until then, I'm really excited that I could go experience
what it's like in VR.
Being in space, learning about what it would be like to travel through time,
we could recreate that experience and you could see it
and you could feel like you were really there. That would be really cool.
I love building motorcycles.
Motorcycles look really cool.
Modifying the way that they operate, the way that they look,
not only is it a fun engineering project,
then you get to ride it.
I still use LEGO bricks,
in fact, there's a motorcycle set that I just put together.
I actually have this exact motorcycle and one of the neatest parts is
there's a drive shaft, just like on the real bike.
I was lucky growing up
that I was encouraged to build things, but I don't think every girl is.
I do think it's important
when we're thinking about a career to see someone like ourselves.
The right way to talk to young girls about engineering,
just encouraging them to follow their interests.
And if their interest is making things encouraging them to make things
and helping them get those tools.
one of the most exciting things for me is that kids
that are playing with LEGO bricks now and building things now
are actually the ones that are going to be building
all of these future devices. Whether they're going to be artists
or hardware engineers like me or building the worlds digitally.
Anyone, whether you're a girl or a boy,
you're going to have challenges in getting what you want.
You're going to have challenges in getting into a place
where you're doing the work that you want.
Everybody is going to face those things.
That's hard enough without hiding who you are.
You know, if you try to hold on to every little thing too tightly
or you're too worried
about what school you get into, or too worried about a single grade,
you miss the whole point.
Stay focused on what you want.
So much of my career
was about building things myself.
And a few years ago, I realized what was just as fun
was helping people, and helping people become
who they wanted to be, or even understand how to become,
you know, more empowered.
If they're LGBTQ and they're not out at their workplace
and they come to our workplace and they feel comfortable being out,
there's a whole lot of stress that that alleviates.
And then they could focus more on on what they love to do.
And that's something I'm really proud of.