Blame the lightsabers. That’s what led me to become a professor. As a high school student, one of my major life goals was to figure out how to build an actual light sword. Doing so is all but impossible, so it didn’t really matter if I went into engineering or science, but I pursued STEM just the same. By the time I was an undergraduate, I’d settled on physics. After that, I went to graduate school to study even more physics until I finally earned a PhD.
No lightsaber ever came to be, but I’ve been teaching undergraduates science for more than 25 years. Genuine interest in STEM—and maybe (again)