Meet Madeleine
Madeleine, also known as Maddie, is an 11th grader from Pittsburgh, PA. Maddie loves building things and plays the cello, the bass and the saxophone. She’s in a jazz band and in the marching band afterschool. Maddie is also on the swimming and diving team and hopes to study mechanical engineering and maybe some aerospace.
“I've always thought of music as math, but with sounds, because whenever you're reading music, it's like a quarter note and a half note and a whole note in like you divide everything and you count your counting. And there has to be like a certain amount of notes in one measure.”
Maddie’s parents have been supportive of Maddie’s love of building and encourage her to pursue engineering. Maddie’s house is the perfect place to be for an aspiring engineer.
“I do a lot of projects around the house, so my parents helped me learn new skills and abilities. We have a shop in our basement with a CNC router, laser cutter and stuff. I go down there, play around with stuff and make whatever I want, which is pretty fun. I find joy in problem-solving and being creative.”
A couple years ago Maddie even built herself a floating loft bed!
Maddie also started an all girls Botball robotics team with her sister. With neighborhood and school friends the girls participated in national competitions.
“We made autonomous robots perform tasks on a table, with a set of rules to it, and we had to do programming in mechanical engineering.
During competitions, we also saw many other teams that were all girls teams and we bonded with them. It was really awesome to just talk with them, collaborate and share ideas.
With our all girls team, we actually didn't have any issues with each other and we were able to problem-solve very well. I feel like I didn't really see that in many of the boys teams that we saw at competitions.”
Maddie sees engineering as a very helpful means to solve problems. She also see STEM as a means to create new things.
“There are so many problems that could be solved using engineering. I definitely want to create new things that have not been created yet. It's always overwhelming to me that people just go to their daily jobs and just make up things to do. They don't have a set thing to do. It could be applied to engineering - if you see a problem, figure out a way to solve it that no one else has thought of.”
Maddie gives some advice to other young people excited about STEM.
“I feel like other young people that are trying to pursue STEM should have the mindset that not everything's going to work out the way they want it to, but you definitely should not give up. If you give up, then what were you working for in the first place?”
