via Black Girl Nerds
When someone mentions STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) you first thoughts are probably equations and giant machines, but if someone were to mention dirt bikes you just might look at them funny. Brittany Young – a young black female engineer in Baltimore, Maryland – created B-360 a multi-award-winning organization that teaches youth about the wonders of STEM by applying it’s various disciplines to dirt bikes.
My background in STEM is I’m an engineer so I have worked for a lot of companies like NASA, the Johns Hopkins physics lab, McCormick & Co. and also a published author for an abstract in science, medical devices, and prototypes. McCormick was really good, one of my last [positions] there was in the kitchen so I helped work on the manufacturing processes and the increase in their techniques, but also create new spices and new foods which were really cool. So I’ve pretty much done everything.
Being in engineering as a minority, then on top of that a black woman and the being from a city that people kind of look down on, and I was still working in engineering around the time of Freddy Gray so just the comments of people not understanding how we as students in urban demographics like mine are always perceived as negative. I’m usually always the youngest, the only woman and the only person that’s from a real city. In one of my first positions, they confused me for the secretary which was like “Oh, haha, no. I’m not the cemetery, I’m actually the engineer.”