Growing up in West Bloomfield, Michigan, Brianne Hall remembers receiving engineering concept lessons in her father’s car on the way to elementary school. Her dad — who had degrees in both civil and mechanical engineering — handed her a paper clip to explain the concept of failure due to fatigue.
“He told me to bend it back and forth to see how it eventually breaks,” she says. “That’s how I understood the concept. He was always pushing me to focus on math and sciences from a very young age. Even in elementary school science fair projects — I once did a corrosion study on different types of metals — clearly his influence, and not something I would have selected on my own in fourth grade. He had me set up baby food jars and placed different metals in water. I had to observe them every day.”