Breyton Hill interviews Dr. Laura Bottomley, an engineering professor at NC State, about her career journey, motivation, and common misconceptions about engineering.

Dr. Bottomley talks about her original dream to be an astronaut right up until the moment she got in the classroom. “I loved it. Teaching was the ultimate puzzle… to figure out how to explain things to people so that they would understand and would get excited about stuff. I was sunk.”

Breyton asks Dr. Bottomley about her career mentors over the years and how one of those mentors prompted Dr. Bottomley to found Women in Engineering at NC State. Dr. Bottomley didn’t see a lot of change happening with regard to getting women into and excited about engineering so she became that change with her K-12 outreach program, the Engineering Place.

The pair discusses how engineering is making a difference in the world and that “engineers are not just people who do math and science alone in their room with the door shut and never talk to people. That image is completely incorrect. [Engineers] have to be very wholistic.”

After clearing up common misconceptions about engineering, Dr. Bottomley offers the question of “what kind of difference do you want to make in the world? Where do you want the impact of your life to be?” and offers some advice on how to discern that.
After that, Secretary of the Raleigh Astronomy Club, Ann Murphy, discusses her interactive booth about how time passes differently as well as how your weight and jumping height changes on different planets.

Ann introduces Pluto’s five different moons. Breyton dives deeper into these moons and the five dwarf planets in our solar system including Pluto, Eris, Ceres, Haumea, and Makemake.

Breyton additionally spoke with volunteer, Toby, on different kinds of telescopes. Volunteer Sydney, also at the telescope booth, explains that using a telescope or binoculars, you can see the planet Mars currently in retrograde.

In this episode Sophs sits down with Destinee Wormack and CJ Jones, students of NC State who will be showcasing their research project at the Symposium on Afrofuturism and Diasporic Scholarship on feb. 19th! They discuss their project and how it focuses on pregnant women of color in prison systems, how these topics are often overshadowed and how they are helping bring it to the forefront. We also discuss different projects and events during or following the symposium open to the public, students or grad students, as well as Nc State's African American Cultural Center and all the great opportunities that come with checking it out! I heavily recommend checking out both the symposium as well as the cultural center after listening to this episode!!

In this episode Sophs speaks to Laura Martin, the chief outreach officer, for Step Up Ministries, an organization that helps individuals and families find housing, work, and overall stability! Step Up offers programs and classes to help prepare people for interviews and other professional meetings that can help provide for them and their family, and provide other help and stability even afterwards. Listen for more information on how Step Up is helping serve the community by stabilizing it!!