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Our guests today are engineers Ayyana Chakravartula and Catherine (Cat) Sheane.
Ayyana is the Failure Analysis and Strategy Lead for the Devices & Services organization at Google. She leads a team of science-y detectives who work to understand why things break and how badly they are breaking, and how our phones and other devices do when people use them in general. The team looks at phones and watches, and other hardware that Google makes, at all stages of development from prototyping to the field.
Cat is the VP of Environmental, Social, Governance, and Sustainability at Parsons Corporation.
Among her specialties is guiding interdisciplinary teams through climate risk assessments and third-party sustainability certifications for large, complex civil infrastructure projects.
Cat is a passionate sustainability champion with 24 years of experience leading sustainability strategy development, action planning, and execution at the corporate and project levels.
In this full-length interview, Ayyana and Cat talk about what led them to become engineers, describe a day in the life as engineers, and reflect on the things that surprise them about their jobs.
Highlights of the episode:
*Opening quotes by Ayyana and Cat on the things they were interested in as kids that led them to pursue careers in science [0:01];
*Susan introduces Ayyana and Cat, engineers at Google and Parsons Corporation, respectively [1:36];
*Ayyana and Cat tell us about their paths to pursuing engineering [4:53];
*How Ayyana and Cat decided to pursue graduate degrees and what that was like [11:20];
*What a day in the life as an engineer looks like [19:00];
*Ayyana and Cat give an example of a time they faced a scientific challenge and how they handled it [28:50];
*Connecting Ayyana’s and Cat’s work to what high school students are learning in science [36:00];
*Advice for high school students interested in engineering [45:14]
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