Emily Chambers has packed a lot of work into four short years of college.
The senior mechanical engineering major has worked with the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) throughout her time at UI. Chambers began mentoring first- and second-year engineering students in SWE when she became an upperclassman. She said she loves working with younger students.
Chambers is a second-generation Vandal. Her father also attended UI for a mechanical engineering degree. After growing up a Vandal fan, she couldn’t resist turning towards UI when it came time to choose where she would go to college.
“This was the campus that spoke to me,” Chambers said. “It had a great program and it was still in-state, so it was a great option.”
Emily Chambers | Courtesy
In high school, Chambers enjoyed well-developed engineering and architecture programs. She had always been interested in building and designing. To her, it felt like a logical course to follow in her father’s footsteps as a mechanical engineer.
Chambers participated in SWE consistently over her college career. This year, she served as the club’s treasurer. Chambers participated in numerous outreach events and a national conference in which the club was recognized for their design work on a Global PepsiCo project.
For the past four semesters, Chambers has mentored engineering underclassmen through SWE.
“Watching how other people think is always a really fun time,” Chambers said.
In addition to working with SWE, Chambers runs her own research project through Engineering Scholars.
“I was involved with one last year,” Chambers said. “That was a lot of fun. I built my own this year on the sustainable watering of plants and crops, big picture.”
Chambers credits her time with SWE as the highlight of her time at UI. She said it’s been incredible to see the impact of SWE in encouraging young women to enter fields in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. She has seen students that end up coming to UI because they came to a SWE-sponsored event in high school that they enjoyed.
“Getting to work with a group of really strong and powerful women and getting to really encourage that next generation to come in and do (engineering) has been really important to me,” Chambers said. “You don’t always get that platform.”
One of her friends and fellow SWE members, Bethany Kersten, points out that Chambers’ work outside of her engineering classwork is an achievement of its own.
“She really is a hard worker and she’s very involved at the same time,” Kersten said. “I think that’s really tough to balance as an engineering student, getting good grades but also staying involved.”
Kersten said both women have a passion for engineering and serving as advocates for women engineers. She describes Chambers as inspiring, dependable and a good role model.
“I’ve worked with her on projects where I see her having a really tough night — maybe she has an exam — and she asks me ‘Can I delay this one little thing,’ and I say ‘yeah, of course,’” Kersten said. “She sees that as a failure where I do not. I see that as her being very honest because she’s letting me know that she can’t complete something within our time frame but she does complete it within a day or two afterwards.”
Lex Miller can be reached at [email protected]