Meet Annette
Choosing the Best Overall
“My senior year, I applied to 10 different schools, thinking that this would make my decision easy. ‘I'll cut some out if they don't accept me,’ I thought. But I got into all of them and had to decide, ‘Well, where do I go?’
“My top two choices were Stanford and UT Austin...both are right up there together in the national chemical engineering rankings. UT is sixth; Stanford is third. But Stanford is four or five times more expensive than UT, and it's so far away. At the end of the day, UT was the best overall package for me – I didn't want to come out with hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans. UT won out compared to all the other schools.”
The Value of Internships
“Internships are definitely a good experience; in engineering they give you a lot of great background and great detail about what you need to know for what you're going to be working with. I think it might be really tough to try to make a decision about where or what type of work you want to do for the rest of your life without having tried out at least one or two other things.”
Annette has participated in several internships during her time at the University. She has completed internships at Shell Oil Products in Houston, ExxonMobil in Beaumont, and Proctor and Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“At the end of every summer when I come back, for some reason, my school experience is better for having had the internship.”
Venturing Out on Your Own
“I got involved in the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) – that’s who I aligned myself with first. They had all kinds of great big sister/little sister programs. The Equal Opportunity in Engineering Office gives you a peer mentor. The College of Engineering gives you a Fall Gathering mentor, so there were all these people to point you in the right direction and tell you where to go.
“UT's a big school, but I think that knowing people - even if you don't end up needing the help - knowing that there are people out there that you can ask for help if you need it, makes it feel smaller. It makes you more willing to venture out on your own and try things, because if that doesn’t work out, you can ask this person what to do next.
“The things that made the biggest difference were being involved in the Society of Women Engineers and also the Peer Mentor Program with EOE Office and the First-Year Interest Group.”
“Internships are definitely a good experience; in engineering they give you a lot of great background and great detail about what you need to know for what you're going to be working with.”
Questions?
Contact Annette by e-mail.