Emotionally inspired engineering
When MIT senior Emma Nelson was teaching engineering classes in China in 2013, a male student remarked of her as an instructor, “I thought we were supposed to meet engineers, not women.” As she stared out at the 100 college students before her, Nelson noticed there was just one female face looking back at her. Nelson, who was there as a mechanical engineering major participating in MIT’s China Educational Technology Initiative (CETI), was face to face with the sobering reality of what her life might have been like: She lived in an orphanage in her native China until age 6, when a family from Chicago adopted her, opening up a path where being female wasn’t considered an impediment to pursuing a successful career as a scientist or engineer. Nelson believes that in a country where families are permitted only one child, she was given up for adoption simply because of her gender....