TURNING POINTS EIGHT
Against the Grain Maria Oden, Ph.D. Professor in the Practice, Engineering Education, Rice University
My parents always wanted me to do something that I really loved, so they just always said, “you do whatever you do for your job every day, so you should choose something that you really like.” Nobody in my family was an engineer. I always wanted to make things, so somehow I gravitated towards that. I had a great-uncle who was an engineer but basically nobody else in my family had that career. It was a little unusual in my family to pick engineering, but they were pretty supportive of me when I found something that I really enjoyed doing. My grandmother, I remember, asked me a few times why I wasn’t going to be a schoolteacher. She thought engineering was a little crazy for a woman. Nobody else in my family seemed to think that, so it was fine. 15