Engineering for seismic safety meets feminism - Samantha Krieg on her career pivot

You've come from a background of being a chef into structural engineering.

How did that happen?

So I started working in restaurants at a really young age.

I actually did a program at my high school where you work in a restaurant for high school credit.

And I got pretty lucky to have a chef that would take me on and show me the ropes and eventually hired me on when someone didn't show up for work.

So that kind of started and fell into that career that way and I really loved it I enjoyed it but since I started so young um kind of reached a point around 1920 where looking to the future and had had already been working full-time for a while and kind of was like is this what's next for me like this now is the time to explore other opportunities if there are any available and also thinking that um not having much of like an education and being in a very physically demanding job, labor intensive job, that if something was to happen to me, what would my future look like? So I decided to pursue what was at the time a backup plan and started looking at different university programs.

But I really wanted to make sure that if I went to university, I would have a really reliable chance of employment afterwards that wouldn't require grad school,

ironically.

And that's why I landed on engineering.

I always say it's kind of funny that it took me so long to get to engineering.

I think I looked at every other career path.

probably available.

But I come from a family with a lot of engineers.

My mom is an electrical engineer.

My dad's a mechanical technician.

And there's other engineers in my family.

So I guess it was just a matter of time for me.