Past National Youth Awardee Eletha Flores shares her current projects with HHF

This would be my first official blogging gig and I’m proud to say my fame and fortune as a blogging artist started with the Hispanic Heritage Foundation. No, but seriously, I’m glad to have this opportunity to share my experiences as a past National Youth Awardee in Math and Engineering and hopefully I can help other young people get excited about what this organization has to offer. So, a little bit about myself: I was borne in North Carolina, lived in Louisiana, but my permanent residence in now in the DC metropolitan area in Prince George’s county Maryland. I just turned 20 years old and I have two years left at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I’m studying towards a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a minor in Applied International Studies, with a focus in the Spanish language and Latin America. This summer, I am renting out a room in a flat in San Sebastian-Donostia, Spain and interning at Fatronik, an international research and development company. I’ll be back at MIT August 31 but I am not particularly looking forward to ending my first three months in Europe. At Fatronik, I’m designing and building on a joystick and video game interface for post-stroke rehabilitation for elderly individuals. The company is small and while there is a good mix of international employees of all ages and backgrounds, I am still the only female in my division which is Biorobotica. Latina engineers, scientists, and related professions in the technical fields: we have to represent! America is not producing enough engineers and scientists on a relative scale compared with other countries. We thus have this opportunity to strengthen our country’s innovation potential. Let your younger siblings and cousins know what’s hot about math and science, and we’ll be that much more powerful as a nation!

I think one of the problems with attracting kids my age and younger into these fields is the perceptions of what kind of career a typical engineer or scientist might have. I mean, of course there are Microsoft and other big name corporations where you will probably start at one level and work your way up the corporate ladder over the course of your career. And yes, said career can include lots of office work, perhaps working long hours in front of the computer. I mean, now that I am thinking about it more and more as I intern and plan for after school, I really don’t want that kind of career. I want to design, create, build mostly in robotics or energy-related fields, but at the same time, you couldn’t hold me down to a chair and isolate me inside a cubicle only to stare fixedly at a computer screen for forty years of my working life if you paid me- a lot. I guess it will be a different story when I weigh my student loans against my means of repaying them (but that’s where scholarships from the HHF can help out too!). Several of my friends also share this same kind of fear of a monotonous and sedentary (or lonely, cold, and dark? Well, it probably isn´t that bad) day job. Maybe kids in high school are forming this kind of image in their mind and thus deciding against technical fields. In these past few years studying engineering, I realized the education part has a lot to do with gaining tools and a way of thinking, but once I have these tools, I want to help people improve their lives. Whether that means designing more energy efficient infrastructure for communities or helping people regain arm function after a stroke, I’m up for making a difference and empowering others. So I plan to start with either research or work in a start-up company that involves a lot of field work, getting out there and talking with people first hand about the problems with their current situations so I can make design decisions based on what’s really important to people, and not just functionally, but psychologically and emotionally as well. That’s where the art of engineering is: considering the culture, age, interests and abilities of people as priorities in design instead of side features. I learned a lot about this from interning at Fatronik. I’ll write a little more about the company and my travels later; I probably should try and get some sleep before I show up to work tomorrow.

Laters,
Eletha