Recent alumna shares post-college lessons

10/30/2020

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Maya D'Souza
Maya D'Souza

MechSE alumna Maya D’Souza (BSME ‘19) now works as a design engineer for 3M. Thursday night, she gave a presentation “Life After College,” talking about her experiences since graduating. 

D’Souza started by talking briefly about her time at Illinois. In addition to her classes and labs, she was heavily involved in Women in MechSE (WiM) as well as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

She then discussed the five main considerations she had while looking for full time work: location, products being produced, technical interest, diversity of the role, and company culture.

“I knew that I wanted to work somewhere where people liked coming to their job,” she said. They're excited about the company and what they were doing, and that they were more collaborative and open to kind of helping each other and building each other up rather than being competitive.”

D’Souza connected this back to skills she learned at Illinois and how those carried over to her current position, emphasizing the importance of soft skills, such as communication, time management, and leadership. She learned many of these through RSO’s as well as technical skills like CAD, design principles, and mechanics, which she learned in various classes like ME 270 Design for Manufacturability.

“With my classes, I was able to get a good feel for things that I liked and I didn't like,” she said. “I realized that I liked things related to mechatronics, and robotics. On the other hand, I personally wasn't as interested in areas like thermo, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer, so I knew that was something that wasn't an area that I was as interested in pursuing.”

Internships also aided D’Souza in discovering her interests, and while she did not participate in any technical RSO’s or research opportunities, she emphasized how these experiences can help you find out what you’re interested in doing after college.

D’Souza then went on to talk about her transition from college to full-time work.

“I would say the two main differences were having a different routine and then going from college where I had an established network of friends to moving to a new place where I didn't know anyone and had to kind of reestablish that network.”

Another aspect of work that was difficult for her at first was what is often referred to as “imposter syndrome”

“It gets easier over time in the sense that you learn to like shift your perspective, and to be more comfortable with challenge or growth,” she said. “And naturally, I think in your role, you want to be challenged, and you want to be continually doing projects that are getting more difficult over time. And so to some degree, I think I'll always have a little bit of that feeling, but I've learned to kind of shift in terms of how I view my role or the challenges that I have.”


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This story was published October 30, 2020.