Three CoE Graduate Students Create Insightful Video Detailing the Challenges of “Womanhood in Engineering”
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PhD candidates Bridget Benner (‘23), Paola Pimentel Furlanetto (‘24), and Jonisha Aubain (‘26) of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department have created a candid, perceptive, and revealing video about the joys and pitfalls of “Womanhood in Engineering (Marriage, Motherhood, and Multicultural Backgrounds).” Their video, which they created as a project for the UMass Amherst 2022-2023 Student FLEXperience.
As the introduction of the video explains so astutely, “As non-traditional students, we are faced with the task of balancing family and academia and often have to go the extra mile to be successful in a campus community geared toward the traditional student, one who is able to dedicate any hour of the day to academic work. And we want to talk about what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated field and the resource gaps and isolation that may hinder the path to success.”
The three students come from diverse backgrounds. Yet, as the three-minute-and-29-second video explains, they all face major challenges in their common pursuit of an engineering career.
Benner is a Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate from Philadelphia who has earned a prestigious National Science Foundation Research Fellowship and studies “flow-induced dynamic instabilities of flexible and flexibly mounted structures.” Above and beyond that, she has also recently married and, at the time of this video, was expecting her first child.
Furlanetto is an immigrant from Brazil who is a PhD candidate in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and an ELEVATE Fellow. In her research, she models pollution impacts of power systems to inform an equitable energy transition. Her husband works in Boston, so the couple must deal with keeping two separate homes, weekly commuting, and, as she says, “a lot of immigration paperwork.”
Aubain, who comes from the U.S. Virgin Islands, is a Mechanical Engineering student, an ELEVATE affiliate, and a graduate assistant in the UMass Amherst Student Parent Programs, which supports parenting students. She studies “the experimental design, construction, and application of tidal energy technology.” She says she is currently trying to balance the incredible demands of working as a Ph.D. candidate and being the single mother of a two-year-old son.
The three MIE grad students were able to make their groundbreaking video through the UMass Flex Program, which “promotes a commitment to our university’s core values—including excellence; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and innovation and impact—while delivering a flexible educational experience to meet the needs of today’s students.”
In particular, the MIE students participated in the 2022-2023 Student FLEXperience, which expands the UMass Amherst student experience by sharing digital stories focused on the overarching theme of “Belonging and Access: How Digital Technology Can Solve Obstacles.”
You can enjoy the total impact of their powerful video by finding it on the “FLEXperience” website linked in the first paragraph of this article and watching the entire show, or by consulting this blog post. (April 2023)