Purdue was a little more inviting. With the other option being the University of Illinois downstate from her suburban Chicago home, Mary Helmick (BSME ’86) felt more welcome as a female Engineering student in West Lafayette.

“I think Purdue had one of the higher percentages of women in engineering at the time,” Helmick says. “It was about 10 percent, which is still pretty small.”

In four and a half years, Helmick made the most of her time at Purdue, which included a work study on campus and a co-op experience in Chicago. Yet the challenging work of “learning how to learn,” she says, may have best prepared her for her project management role at Texas Instruments in Dallas.

Fluid Dynamics

Through nearly three decades now at Texas Instruments, Helmick remains a mechanical engineer who works well with other engineers — especially the electrical and computer ones. That comfort level in the workplace may have stemmed from the labs in fluid mechanics on campus and the chance to swap out the classroom studies for real-world experience in the co-op program.

“Mechanical engineering has pretty broad applicability,” Helmick says. “It set me up well to work with the different people who develop and manufacture our products. Because the products are complicated, it takes all disciplines. Even where I’m not an expert, I can speak the language, and I am trainable.”

In addition to a work study on campus her freshman year, Helmick used a scholarship, to offset out-of-state tuition and pay her own way through college. Her father passed away about six weeks before she enrolled at Purdue, so school coincided with hard work. “When I worked in Chicago, I saved all my money and was able to pay my tuition without having to take out too many loans,” she says. “So I graduated with a lot of experience and more ideas on what to do professionally.”

Partnering with engineering teams on supply chain matters about semiconductor devices, Helmick works on a decidedly cutting edge of the technology industry. “Keep going until you get an answer,” Helmick says. “Knowing how to approach problems and how not to be intimidated by hard problems — that’s how I benefited most from my engineering education.”

Scholarship Challenge

Helmick is passing along the benefits of an engineering education through an endowed scholarship. She started the scholarship a few years ago by taking advantage of the Presidential and Trustee Scholarship Challenge match offered by the University. “It seemed like a unique opportunity to do something I thought I would never be able to do,” she says. “Endowing a scholarship sounds like something only rich people can do.”

The scholarship she’s paying forward is reminiscent of the one she received about 35 years ago. “My parents didn’t really have the means to pay for my sisters and me to attend college,” she says. “We were one of those families where the only option was to go to college, but the bill was on us.”

For some student, perhaps someone among the 25 percent of young women now entering the engineering disciplines at Purdue, that bill is a bit more manageable thanks to Helmick.