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The Purdue Women in Engineering Program offers a TON of awesome opportunities and resources to assist female students during their time at Purdue. Learn a little bit about some of these resources below, or visit the Women in Engineering Program website for even more information! Residential Learning Community : Live in a learning community with other future engineers – the friends you’ll do homework with, take selfies with, cram for exams with, and eat too much pizza with. Mentors and Mentees Program : We all need advice from time to time, and WIEP offers two ways to get it. One is Pair Mentoring, where first- and second-year women are paired-up with a junior or senior woman. If you’d rather be in a group, the Group Mentoring Program gets all levels of undergrad women together. (Free!) Tutoring : When you need a leg up in class, you can get free tutoring. Yes. Free. Every evening. What’s not to love? Women in Engineering Seminar Class (ENGR 194) : Get inspired by Purdue women engineer...

In my last post I talked about the many experiences I had during my year away on co-op, and in this post I will share how those experiences have impacted my professional and personal life moving forward.  Because I was on co-op rotation for a year, I will now graduate one year later than I was planning to when I started college. Even though this is not the conventional path, I believe that the experiences I had and knowledge I gained during my co-op far outweigh that.  Before my co-op I didn’t have any other engineering work experience, so I lacked confidence in my abilities. During my co-op I gained a lot of experience in conducting important projects, and working with dynamic teams. Having these foundational experiences has given me the skills and confidence necessary to be successful in future roles. While working I got exposure to many different types of industry roles, which allowed me to figure out what type of role I am interested in pursuing after graduation.  I r...

In the first part of this series I talked about how I acquired my co-op position, and in this post I’ll talk about many of the great experiences I had during my co-op terms. I worked in two different roles during my co-op, each for about 7 months. In my first role I worked as a Product Developer on adult care products, and in my second role I worked as a Process Engineer on paper towels. These two roles were vastly different, which is something I chose purposely in order to get a broad experience and see different areas of the business (research vs manufacturing). In both of my roles I had the opportunity to work on meaningful projects and take initiative to do things I thought needed to be done. I never felt like I was “just a co-op”, and I was never treated that way either. I felt like I was an equally valued employee contributing important work to my team and to the company as a whole. Kimberly-Clark is a global consumer products company that primarily produces paper based products....

You may have noticed that I disappeared from the blog for a while… and that is because for the past year I have been off campus working for Kimberly-Clark Corporation as a co-op student. I plan to share my co-op experience with you all in a three-part blog series. When I started college, I was not planning to do a co-op at all, in fact I was eager to complete my four years of school as fast as I could. It was only when I talked to other co-op students that I realized it was something I might be interested in. For a little background, a co-op is essentially an extended internship. The difference is that you spend multiple terms with the same company, usually with a different work assignment each term. It is a great way to really get to know a particular company and the various opportunities they offer, as well as a way to get work experience that is more in-depth than is possible during a single summer internship. Purdue has a ton of resources for students interested obtai...