“Don’t you dare tell yourself you can’t do something because you’re a woman.” Amy Reibman, an ECE professor here at Purdue, pushes young women to remember this. Reibman reminds women that in life you’ll encounter times when people will tell you you can’t do it because you’re a women, but regardless, that you should never believe it.
Professor Reibman is a remarkable example of a successful woman engineer, from being a brilliant scientist and engineer to even being on the USA’s Women’s Fencing Team! Reibman fell in love with math at a young age and pursued engineering because of that passion. As she grew older, her interests led her to be fascinated by videos, which were still a new concept 25 years ago. After finishing school Reibman spent about 25 years researching about videos, with 23 of these years at AT&T, being an industrial researcher. While she was at AT&T, she was part of the team that pioneered sending videos to and from devices such as your phone, something that wasn’t possible at the time. After her time in industry, Reibman decided to become a professor, currently teaching ECE 302, Probabilistic Methods in Electrical and Computer Engineering. After jumping from school to industry, then back to an academic environment, Reibman wishes to give her college freshman self the advice to not expect that what works for you at one age will always work for you at all ages. That you’ll always be learning more about yourself as you go along, learning about what you like, what you don’t like, what you’re good, what you’re not good at and how to do things you aren’t good at. She also warned herself that there’s no way you’ll be able to avoid writing, even if you go into the most technical of fields, and that communication is key and that may just take up the majority of your day.
Stay tuned for more blogs on different paths through engineering!
- Compiled by WE Link Recruitment Project Committee Blog Group
Cassandra McCormack, Emmalee Severson, Gloria Chen, Shelby Hartzell
Stay Connected with Purdue WIEP!
Twitter: @PurdueWIEP
Instagram: @PurdueWIEP
Email: purdue.welink@gmail.com
0 Comments