The Moment Makers

Some of our team had the awesome opportunity to attend the Houston area #FIRSTLikeAGirl Women in STEM Build Event at Space Center Houston today. We had some great talks about what it means to be allies for each other in STEM. We also had fun helping to encourage all the rookie FIRST girls as they start their own great robotics journeys with their teams. It was also great to be inspired by FIRST teams older than us, as well as females in engineering.

One of our team’s personal heroes Dr. Menzer Pehlivan was the keynote speaker. She is one of the engineers featured in the documentary Dream Big. Ever since we watched Dream Big at our science museum, we have been so inspired by the engineers and students in that movie. Our team kept going back to see it over and over again until it stopped playing. If you have not had a chance to watch it, please do. It has been released on Blu-ray now, and it is really awesome! We could go on and on about how much this movie means to our team!

Dr. Pehlivan gave a talk entitled “Women in STEM —  Be the Ally.” She stressed how we all need an ally to help encourage us to succeed in whatever we choose to do. We loved hearing more about her life and her awesome engineering career. We will always remember her inspiring slide about how magic happens outside of our comfort zone and how she encouraged us to be like the “Fearless Girl” from the statue in New York City.

There was a panel of high school students from FRC and FTC teams that shared their experiences and answered our questions. We are also very grateful to the professionals in STEM that were part of another panel discussion. We hope to be like them someday!

We, of course, also had fun building field kits to be used at the regional championships. We made some great friends while we built together!

Thank you so much to Jacobs Technology for hosting this event. We really hope that we can come back next year!