Washington People: Janie Brennan
Working to remove barriers to engineering careers
Trained as an engineer, Janie Brennan, a senior lecturer at the WashU McKelvey School of Engineering, now builds courses instead of machines. She’s using her classroom to peel away systemic and cultural barriers to engineering.
Brennan always assumed her aptitude for math and science would lead her to a career in engineering, whether that be in industry or research. But near the end of her graduate program, she worked as a teaching assistant to undergraduate students. And she loved it.
“Oh my god where has this been all my life,” Brennan said about her first encounter with teaching. “It’s that feeling where you don’t know something exists and then you do it and you’re like, ‘This is the best thing ever.’ Suddenly everything I thought I was going to do took a hard right turn.”
Brennan said one of her favorite parts of teaching is designing a course from the ground up.
“There’s something very satisfying and meditative about trying to make your presentation and activities structured so that people will understand it better,” Brennan said. “That’s how I engineer. I engineer my course design.”
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