Lydia Gilmore – video transcript
I’ve always had interest in math and art and I found that engineering was actually a really cool way to kind of combine them; I love moving parts, I’ve always been very crafty and also just good at the sciences so engineering seemed like a pretty ideal way to combine everything. I went to a couple programs here, some expos, to get kids interested in STEM, and I found that it gave me the same fulfillment as making a craft or like solving a math problem and it was kind of a cool combination of those things and it made me really excited to do STEM. I was told by everyone it was going to be a lot to balance engineering and running at the same time, and it definitely was, but I think in a way it helped me stay engaged in my career, I think, because it helped me compartmentalize. I’m just an engineer for certain hours and then I’m just an athlete for certain hours, so I get a little rest from each one and I can shift my priorities as needed. So it actually kind of created a good structure and scaffolding to my academic career so I actually think it helped me out quite a bit. Longterm, probably a dream job would be designing some sort of wearable with textiles designing running technologies whether that’s running shoes, creating new materials, really anything like that would be dream job but textiles are super interesting to me so I’m excited to dive more into that in the next couple years.