A few years back, I'm on a project team headed to a military base. Four of us on the team. Three white men. And me.

We walk into the room, and the commander comes in, does that scan, you know the one, sizing up the room. And his eyes land on me.

He walks over, hands me a legal pad and a pen, and starts the meeting.

Now I look down at this pad. Then I look up at him. And I raise my hand like I'm back in the third grade.

"Sir, what are these for?"

He says, "To take notes."

Now, in that moment, I had a choice. I could read him. I mean, really read him, in front of his own team, on his own base. Or I could take the high road.

I chose the high road. Barely.

I said, "I appreciate that, but I'm actually the mechanical engineer of record on this project. Not the notetaker."

Y'all, that man turned every shade of red the human body can produce. He apologized. Profusely. And to his credit, from that point on, he treated me like exactly who I was.

But here's the thing I want you to sit with. He didn't hand that pad to the loudest person in the room. He didn't hand it to the newest person, or the youngest looking one. He handed it to the only woman. The only Black woman. Because somewhere, without even clocking it, his brain had already decided who belonged at the table and who was there to serve it.

I wasn't offended that he made a mistake. People make mistakes. I was struck by how automatic it was. No hesitation. No second-guessing. Just: female, not white, must be here to take notes.

And I tell that story not because it's rare. I tell it because it's Tuesday. It's still Tuesday for a lot of women in engineering, in STEM, in boardrooms across this country.

The good news? That commander learned something that day. And so did I. I learned that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do isn't raise your voice. It's raise your hand, ask the question, and let the silence do the rest of the work.

I didn't start out trying to fix education. I started out as an engineer.
Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering. And in every room, every lab, every project meeting, I did the math fast, not the equations, the other math. Counting how many people in the room looked like me.

The answer was almost always one. Me.

And I kept asking myself, why? Why am I the only one? It didn't make sense. It wasn't a talent gap. It wasn't a curiosity gap. Somewhere between a kid falling in love with how things work and a grown woman standing in a boardroom, most of the people who could've been standing next to me got filtered out. Quietly. Early. Before they even knew it was happening.

So I made a decision. I was going to go back. Not backward, back. Back into the pipeline. Back to where the filtering starts. Because if I was going to be the only one in the room, fine, I could handle that. But I wasn't going to let that be the story for the next generation of women, and especially Black and Brown women, coming up behind me.

I wanted more kids to have real access to STEM and engineering. Not a poster in the hallway. Not a one-day career fair. Real access. And somewhere in that decision, I knew something else, just as clearly as I knew two plus two.

I knew I was the one to do it.

So I traded blueprints for lesson plans. And I've spent the last twenty years building the same thing I built as an engineer: systems. Except now the system I'm building is a pathway. One that makes sure the next brilliant kid who could out-think half the adults in the room never has to wonder if she belongs in it.

That's why I'm still in this fight. Not because engineering failed me. Because I refused to let it fail the next person who looked like me.