Jill Tietjen Shares Advice With Women in STEM
Armour College of Engineering was delighted to host Jill S. Tietjen, electrical engineer of over 35 years, President of the Board of the National Women’s Hall of Fame, CEO of Technically Speaking, and Inductee of the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame this past Monday, November 17. Tietjen shared her lecture, Halls of History, Horizons of Leadership: Women Engineering the Future, to students who attended from all Colleges at IIT.
As a Fellow Life-long Member of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Tietjen is very active in bringing Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to students early on in their educational careers. It bothered her during a SWE reach out project, when asking 6th graders to name a famous woman in STEM, the one and only answer was always Marie Curie. While definitely a great example, she felt that other accomplished females throughout history have been severely excluded in typical history books. This prompted Tietjen, along with her co-author, Charlotte S. Waisman, to write Her Story: A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America, which offers a look at America’s unsung female champions beginning in the 1500s to the present.
Tietjen shared five specific principles that were present in all women throughout her book: Vision, Ethics and Values, Community, Stewardship, and Passion). She offered a piece of advice to the women in attendance who are in STEM fields: to keep working hard, network with like minds who share the same qualities and drive, and to properly recognize the accomplishments of today’s nominating each other for their work.
