Amelia Earhart Aerospace Summit inspires students in aerospace engineering
The goal of the Amelia Earhart Aerospace Summit was to empower students within the aerospace engineering field.
By all accounts, the inaugural day-long event overwhelmingly accomplished that.
Purdue students, students from visiting universities, Purdue professors, and industry professionals who attended say they left heartened, inspired, and armed with knowledge.
“The Summit was nothing short of extraordinary in my eyes,” says Maisie Linker, the president of Women in Aerospace, a student organization in Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics and one of the organizers of the Summit.
“The reason I know it was successful is because I had many people come up to me and thank me for the event. Some said they left feeling inspired, others wanted to become more involved with Women in Aerospace. Overall, I really could not have been happier with how it turned out.”
Four keynote speakers provided more than just perspective on careers in academia, government and industry, but also delivered inspirational and encouraging messages to the 115 students who registered. The mentoring session and a career success panel allowed students to network and interact with members from AAE’s Industry Advisory Council, a group of AAE alumni who are leaders in aerospace engineering fields. A poster competition presented an opportunity for feedback on students’ research. A graduate school information session offered undergraduate students insight into the steps toward making a decision about grad school and included a six-member panel of current AAE graduate students to answer questions.
“Everybody liked the Summit,” says Gayathri Shivkumar, the president of AAE’s Graduate Women’s Gatherings, the other student organization that hosted the event. “They enjoyed all the talks. They enjoyed the food. They enjoyed all the events. So I think it was a success.”
Not only for the students who attended.
Members of the IAC who were involved in the event, whether as a mentor, a keynote speaker, on a panel or even as an attendee, praised the effort by Purdue’s student organizations.
Anna-Maria Rivas McGowan (BSAAE ’92) and Tamaira Ross (BSAAE ’96, MSAAE ’98), whose keynote talks were some of the day’s most popular and heavily attended, say it was important for them to be involved in the event because of its mission.
“I think this event is great,” says Ross, a configuration design engineer at Blue Origin. “Focusing on similarities rather than differences is important, but I also think women having a cohort in which they can socialize with and feel like they’re not alone, I think like that’s very important, too. So if I can contribute to that in a positive way, I’m more than happy to do so and share my experiences. For me, mentoring and teaching is a vital part of my life, as well as my career, so having an opportunity to do that, especially back at Purdue, even if I don’t live here anymore, is really important for me to be able to share that.”
Ross had a more technical bent to her keynote talk, sharing what she’s learned over her career working across airplanes, satellites, military craft, and launch vehicles, and the similarities in those systems. But she still shared about her career trajectory, mentors along the way — and their interesting advice, such as, “Your job is to make everybody a little bit unhappy” — and the importance of speaking different technical languages, something she had to learn throughout her career.
Ross also was on the career panel that took questions, and she was happy to offer advice.
“I would characterize mentoring and teaching as important throughout my career,” she says. “I was part of the Women in Engineering mentoring program even when I was a graduate student here at Purdue. So being mentored and being a mentor has been important throughout my career. So I think having the opportunity to pay it forward and have somebody learn from my experiences is a great way to do that. And when I mentor people, I learn, too, so it’s a learning experience for me as well when I have the opportunity to interact with other people.”
McGowan delivered the NASA keynote talk — she is NASA’s Senior Engineer for Complex Systems Design, working out of Langley — and charged students to embrace diversity in many ways, not just demographically but also in exploring diversity of opportunities available in the aerospace profession and in defining success in their own way. She’s shaped by her Trinidadian roots, and the culture she was raised in, she says. Her parents, Kenneth and Merle, instilled never to associate anything she couldn’t change about herself, demographically speaking, with competence or ability. McGowan told students they should not allow anyone’s assumptions about them to limit them. Rather, McGowan reminded students that their uniqueness "can be a blessing to your team.”
McGowan’s encouraging message was perfectly aligned with the Summit’s goals.
“The Amelia Earhart Summit at Purdue is incredible,” says McGowan, who spent more than 30 minutes after her keynote talk speaking to a handful of students individually. “The students took some of the vision, the passion, the energy that Amelia Earhart had and brought it forward for the 21st century and tried to capture that to inspire students going forward. To see all these wonderful women and men, aerospace engineering students, coming together to say, ‘How do we advance the field of aerospace engineering in a very visionary, inspiring and forward-looking way?’ So the Amelia Earhart Summit was a great opportunity to inspire students about the future of aerospace.”
The bulk of the students who attended were Purdue AAE students, but a group from Michigan’s Women in Aeronautics and Astronautics program and a handful of Illinois and Notre Dame students also attended.
“Now that this was such a success and some people know about it, we’re hoping the word will spread,” Shivkumar says. “All the senior class that attended this time will be in industry or maybe other schools going to grad school next year, and they can talk to their peers and so on. Some of them will be really successful and even can come back as speakers some day.
“We’re hoping at some point it becomes a national conference or, even, an international conference.”
That’s what AAE Professor Alina Alexeenko envisions, too. Alexeenko was the “leading force,” Linker says, in creating the Summit.
“Amelia Earhart continues to be an inspiration to students at Purdue and beyond and this is why we wanted to have the event carry her name," Alexeenko says. "The idea came after AAE GWG organized a lunch tour of Purdue Archives’ exhibit 'Missing You: Navigating Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight and Enduring Legacy' about a year ago. My favorite quote by Amelia is from her notes for the first engineering course for women at Purdue she was designing, 'No one is educated who does not seek to influence others for good of those around him. Who does not try to improve conditions outside his own life.'
"We hope the Amelia Earhart Summit as a networking and mentoring platform will be an influence for the good.”