I usually describe myself as an engineer; that's basically what I've been doing since I was a kid.
I wanted to be an engineer.
I had been tracked from grades 1 through 12 in an accelerated program in the public school system in Memphis and had done well in math and science classes. When I was getting ready for college, my guidance counselors suggested I look into engineering.
I was born in the city of Brantford, Ontario, Canada - but by the time I'd left high school, I'd moved seven times with my family, my father's engineering work taking us to places as far-flung as Bay City, Texas, and Wolnae-Ri in South Korea.
My father worked for governments all his life as an engineer and public works director.
My father describes himself as a Pole of Lithuanian descent. At Southampton University, he read aeronautical engineering and then the family moved to Hong Kong - this was before I was born - where he designed aeroplanes. Back in the U.K., he worked as a civil engineer, although every spare minute was spent researching his family's history.
My dad is a Ghanaian immigrant, and he wanted a son who was an engineer.
I don't want to be a hardware engineer. That seems like a terrible job.
I never knew what an engineer did for a living when I was a kid. I still don't.
I did not grow up thinking that I wanted to be an engineer. I had read some articles about girls becoming increasingly scientifically illiterate and that girls lacked confidence in their capabilities when it came to quantitative skills. And I just thought that was kind of wrong.
When I became an astronaut, I was an engineer.
I wanted to develop a career where I could use my engineering background to have a positive effect on society.
I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. But I didn't get a good rank, so I got civil engineering.
If I could do anything, I'd be an engineer of some sort. I used to build robots.
I was Google's first woman engineer.
My dad wanted me to be a professional person, which I was - I was a civil engineer. I graduated from civil engineering at USC in California. I became an engineer, and I helped design the roads for the L.A. County Roads Department. And I did that for about one and a half years in a sense to please my parents - to be a 'respectable' person.
I only learned what an engineer was from a college guidance counselor. When she described it, a light clicked on in my head, and I said, 'Yes, that's what I want to do.'
In 1989, I retired from Bell Laboratories to become a full-time writer. Not that I didn't enjoy my engineering career, but rather I liked being a novelist just a bit better.
My dad was an electrical engineer.
My parents, and especially my mother, encouraged by the director of the local school which I was attending, wanted in spite of everything to send me to a National School of Arts and Crafts so that I could later become an engineer.
Many people think all I do is some random engineering work in between caving expeditions. It's been far more deliberate than that.
My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.
I was originally supposed to become an engineer but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a loathsome capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me.
The most rewarding, insightful and challenging year of my life was my 'Year in Industry' working as a trainee engineer at Black & Decker, which involved studying part time at college.
I never had a doubt that I wanted to do engineering.
