The “Her Stories: Adventures in STEM” blog series is a collection of stories about 20 women in science and engineering fields, written by members of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Pre-College Engagement and Support (PCES) Committee.
These inspiring women have experienced a variety of life experiences and career paths, and these stories and accompanying artwork help to capture the vast diversity of our featured scientists and engineers.
We hope this series will show you how exciting engineering and science can be and help you realize that anyone can choose to become a scientist or an engineer.
Story by Kerry Moriarty
Pamela Cosman first began thinking about engineering as a career at only 6 years old when she found out she loved playing with her brother’s building toys, like Legos and toy trains. Her enthusiasm for building led her to create elaborate marble machines that could fill a room, exploring more and more design possibilities.
After college, Pamela decided to use her interest in engineering to inspire others by becoming a professor. She loved discussing research, teaching, and explaining concepts to others, and continuing her own education. She taught lecture classes, like basic electric circuits and digital image processing.
She also loved to mentor her students in hands-on classes, like the capstone senior design project, where teams of senior students designed and built a solution for a client in a technical industry. She strives to be a truly great advisor to her students and to have a lasting impact on their success in engineering.
Pamela lets her interests guide her career and her life goals. She has always been interested in health care. In high school, she considered becoming a doctor and volunteered in the emergency room for one year to better understand medicine and the hospital setting.
Although she eventually landed on engineering for her education, she’s done a lot of engineering projects over the years related to health care and never lost sight of this interest.
After becoming an engineer, she continued her education and studied how the quality of medical scans and images affect the doctor’s diagnosis. Now, Dr. Cosman is a distinguished professor at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in the department of electrical and computer engineering.
Pamela continues to be a mentor and advisor inside and outside the classroom setting. Through a colleague at UCSD, Pamela got involved in a summer internship program for young adults with autism or atypical ways of thinking and processing information.
She coached teams of these students to create video games with an educational research purpose. She also coached them in workplace etiquette and workplace communication. Mentoring on these topics has become another one of her many activities!
Her youth outreach efforts do not end here. After struggling for years with imposter syndrome herself, she decided to partner with a sociologist to develop a program to help young girls feel confident in STEM school programs and careers.
Yet, of all of her activities and experiences in life, Pamela’s proudest achievement was raising her four sons. Throughout the boys’ childhoods, her family talked about engineering concepts at the dinner table. When explaining engineering, she would sometimes create a story out of the technical concept.
This creative exploration led to a deeper study of storytelling and writing, which in turn led Pamela to write and publish two children’s books. Her books, The Secret Code Menace and The Hexagon Clue, combine mystery stories with STEM concepts for 9- to 11-year-old readers.
In The Secret Code Menace, a group of kids learn about error correction coding, which starts out a way to pass secret coding messages in class. Then there is a hostage crisis, and the code proves to be useful in solving that.
Writing has been a fun hobby for Pamela ever since she started writing stories when she got home from school as a kid. She is happy to combine her engineering career with her enjoyment of writing.
Similar to starting with a blank notebook and writing a new story, Pamela says, “Engineering is an exciting field where you can imagine the future and build it!”
For girls who are interested in helping people or saving the planet, there are many areas of engineering that accomplish this. Engineers develop pacemakers, x-ray machines, glucose monitors, electric wheelchairs, and thousands of other devices that contribute to health and longevity. For sustaining the planet, engineers make solar cells, desalination plants, and electric cars.
Engineering touches on every area of life, and as Pamela has proven, engineers can also be passionate writers, artists, and mothers.
The “Her Stories: Adventures in STEM” series is a collection of stories about 20 women in science and engineering fields, written by members of the SWE Pre-College Engagement and Support (PCES) Committee. Dive into the rest of the series here!
Know a pre-college student interested in STEM? Join SWENext, the Society’s free program that allows students ages 5 through 18 to join the SWE engineering and technology community.
SWENexters enjoy numerous opportunities throughout the year to learn, network, and connect with peers, role models, and industry professionals. Plus, this diverse, welcoming, pre-college STEM community provides a safe place where kids can feel seen, heard, and validated. SWENext is open to all genders.
