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.
