Letters, Packages, Good Advice: How Mom Nurtured My Inner Engineer

The theme of the upcoming Scientiae carnival is "Mothers and Others, women who have influenced you along the way". So here are my musings. scientiae-carnival

I am fond of saying that my mom is the reason I became an engineer. She is not, of course, the sole reason I became an engineer, nor is she the sole person responsible for me sticking it out despite all the crap I had to put up with and all the jerkwads who tried to discourage me and get me to quit along the way. But she played a pretty significant role, and that's all the more remarkable given who she is and where she came from.

My mom was a coal miner's wife, not an easy life. Her major life roles were as housewife and mother. She "mothered" her younger brother and sister after their own mother died very young, so even before she was married she was raising children. And she had six of her own, so she spent about 35 years taking care of kids.

But mom was the person who first suggested to me that I should study engineering. My high school guidance counselor was all but useless, as was my high school. Mom had two brothers who had studied engineering and had thus escaped the coal mines. (One of these was the brother she had raised.) She didn't really know what engineering was, but she knew it involved a lot of math, having watched these brothers at their studies. I was good at math, and so it seemed obvious to mom that I should try engineering.

I don't know why my mother was not inhibited in her ambition for me by the stereotype of engineering as a man's field, or why she didn't have more stereotypical ideas of what kind of work I should do, or even why she was not more primarily concerned about me finding a good husband. She just thought that I would be able to do the work, and that I would get a good-paying job like her brothers had. One of them worked for NASA! Good money, and you could help send someone to the moon!

It was exciting and terrifying to leave my very, very small town for the main campus of Penn State, which felt like a giant city to me. Homesickness was sharp and isolating. I had a roommate who refused to believe that my father was a coal miner because, as she insisted, "that's all done with machines. They don't have any people in the mines now." Even at a state land-grant university, I felt a bit out of place. But mom knew I would be homesick. She wrote me letters constantly, two, sometimes three a week. They might only be a paragraph or two, but it was mail. I was often the only person on my dorm floor who got mail from home. She sent me packages with homemade cookies and other treats, and always with plenty "to share with your friends". Every so often the university would send my parents a letter offering them a chance to have a pre-packaged "treats" package sent to me. These, I suppose, were for the parents who wanted to show their children they cared, but were too lazy or busy to actually put together packages for their kids. My mom and dad always had these packages sent to me in addition to the homemade stuff mom sent.

The net effect of all this was that I could never feel completely alone, because on any given day when I was feeling down, I was almost sure to get something in the mail either that day or the next from mom, telling me she was thinking of me. One letter in particular stands out in my mind; enclosed in the letter were three crumpled dollar bills. Mom said she'd found these "in the bottom of her purse" and she thought maybe I could use them to "chip in" with my friends for some pizza some night. lt nearly makes me cry to remember this. Let me put this in context. My mom and dad were paying for every bit of my education. They thought it was their responsibility, and they didn't want me to go into debt. I had a tiny scholarship my first year, and some minimal work-study income, but other than that my parents paid for all my tuition, room & board, books, and other expenses. I don't know how they did this because it's not like we ever had extra money laying around the house. When my mother wrote that she'd found three dollars in the bottom of her purse and sent them to me, she was speaking literally. Those three dollars were found money. And rather than save it for groceries or, god forbid, something for herself, she sent it to me, so I'd have a little extra - because she knew the other girls on my dorm floor generally had more spending money than me.

In these ways, mom tried her best to help me stay happy so that I could focus on my studies and do well at school. But probably the single most important thing she did for me in my undergraduate years was convince me to retake my first calculus course - and that, as they say, has made all the difference.

My dismal high school didn't offer calculus, and though I had excelled at all the math it did offer, it wasn't enough to keep me from drowning in my college calculus course. I staggered out at the end of the first term with a D that felt like a more generous grade than my understanding warranted. Like many a female engineering student before and since, I concluded that this meant I could not do engineering. When I expressed my concerns to my advisor, he essentially agreed with me and said maybe I should think about switching majors.

Mom, however, would have none of it. Keep the same major through the end of your freshman year, she said, and then if you still want to switch, you can. If you didn't understand calculus, just take the course over again. So what if you get out of sequence? Maybe you can take some courses in the summer to get back on schedule. She had an answer for every objection. Years later she confessed to me that, at the summer orientation session for parents, they had been warned of common pitfalls freshman year and how to deal with them. My mom must have taken notes and studied them, because she was just ready and waiting for me.

So, I repeated the first calculus course. Suddenly it all made sense! This is how I described it in my essay in She's Such a Geek!

Calculus suddenly started making exquisite sense to me. My stern female professor clearly loathed teaching us, as we were undeserving of and too hormonal for the beauties of calculus. But under her tutelage I began to sense the joy in the equations, I think because she so clearly experienced it even as she was denigrating and condescending to us. The final exam was scheduled for three hours, and was comprised of 100 questions ranging over the entire semester's material. I was nervous beforehand, but once I was given the test and began working, all the nerves went away and I entered a zone of mental existence that I have never again completely attained. Every problem was easy, and I was sure of every answer. In one hour I had finished the exam. I reworked every problem, and this took me only half an hour. I knew that every answer was correct. I was the first to turn in my exam, and I walked out of the classroom with the exhilaration of my performance still making me tingle. That math high was as powerful as my first orgasm, and lasted longer, too.

After that math high, I was hooked. There was no way I would ever consider switching out of engineering again.

Incidentally, that math professor was the first of only two female professors I had in a science or engineering course as an undergraduate. She completely commanded respect in the large lecture hall where our class met. The notes I took in that class were sweet and clear, the most beautiful of any class I've ever had, because she lectured so well. To this day I regret that I didn't hang on to that notebook; it was such a thing of beauty.

Does that make me a geek? Yes, I am a such a geek. And for that, I thank you, Mom.

Here's a picture of mom and my sister Cindy, who is a totally awesome sister and another woman who has been important in my life.