How tea-time tuition led to a top-tier engineering career
It was on the shores of Pymatuning Lake that Gisele Marks confirmed where her future lay. As an ambitious undergraduate, she had been selected for a summer programme at the Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology – a field station that is part of?the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Biological Science.?
Aside from lifelong memories (“lakeside cabins, sticky-buns for breakfast and Canadian geese everywhere”), the work affirmed that STEM was the only path for her. “I loved all of it - evidencing duckweed impact, water quality and documenting data.”
Her path into engineering had begun, she recalls, much earlier, at the dinner table of her family home in the rust-belt town of McKeesport.
With a passion for education, her mother seized the moments when a young Gisele and her older brother were sitting attentively, to widen their knowledge. “She ensured we learned vocabulary from the dictionary and introduced us to spatial mathematic activities such as tangrams.”
While she looked forward to these sessions, Gisele was, she says, unaware of? the intent. “Little did we know that mother was mentoring us into careers in science and maths.”
At school her ability and intellect were evident. Her instinctive love of science was further encouraged by a group of engineers from Pittsburgh, who came to her town to tutor twice a week. “They encouraged minority students to pursue engineering and science careers and they set me on my track.”
After graduating in Biological Sciences she continued to study, gaining a Masters in Civil Environmental Engineering.
Gisele’s impressive CV includes many of the big-hitters of the industrial and consulting worlds such as IBM, Jacobs and Accenture. Her career has focused on enterprise asset management (EAM), supporting major organisations to more effectively manage their assets. She has project managed the implementation of EAM solutions, such as IBM Maximo, and helped clients with strategy development, process improvement and in realizing their asset management goals.
Today, as a solutions architect at Cohesive, a Bentley Systems company,?her work centres around assets of all kinds - wastewater treatment facilities, hospitals, airports, aviation, or power plants. But at heart, she explains, it’s about helping owner operators to maintain the value of their assets and to understand? digital and cognitive technologies and the impact that those technologies can have on traditional business processes.
Today, after 23 years in the industry, she is eager to share her own knowledge and to inspire and advise others looking to follow her path.
Engineering, she advises those looking to enter the discipline, offers so much more than ‘formulas and calculations.’ It demands, she says “innovation, collaboration, people-to-people work and knowledge transfer.”
In common with other sectors though, it is fast moving and continual learning and development, she says, is a must. “Know where the world is going and go with it. Read journals and watch the news. Think about complementary proficiencies to your main focus – what about learning a language for example?”
Identifying individuals who can motivate and push you, she says is, critical too. Two such figures for Gisele were her high school English teacher, Cynthia Baldwin and her husband, chemical engineer Art Baldwin. “They provided a tsunami of inspiration and motivation, encouraging the teen of a rust belt town to keep moving to better and best.”
Today Gisele is both mum and grandmother. Science and maths, she said, were central to her own childrens’ daily lives as they grew up – including with their own tea-time tuition. And their chosen professions? She smiles. “They have both chosen roles in STEM.”
"My daughter received her BS/MS in Mathematics and teaches at two Atlanta universities.?My son is an Academic Counselor for the School of Computer Science, Kennesaw State University.? So I am proud of the legacy.? And it all started with making math fun!"
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