Kate Schneidau, M.S., mechanical engineering, University of Louisville

Today’s young women engineers find this field can inspire entrepreneurial ambitions.

For Kate Schneidau, the idea of becoming an engineer began early, “right after my princess and racecar driver stages as a child,” she says. “I always wanted a field that would allow me to be creative and problem solve.”

Schneidau comes from a family of engineers, as her older sister, father, and grandfather are also engineers. Her mom is a teacher. Her early exposure to engineering began with helping her dad and grandfather work on cars, which built a foundation of understanding tools and how to build your way to a final product.

In middle school, she could always picture herself as an engineer. “I’ve gone through phases of wanting to work on cars like my dad, who is an engineer at Ford Motor Co., build rollercoasters, be an Imagineer at Disney, and be a nuclear engineer. My dad was and still is one of my heroes.”

Stepping up
An opportunity to build her problem-solving skills came while she was finishing her graduate degree at the University of Louisville. The COVID pandemic hit, forcing a number of educational institutions to close down.

“When I was at U of L, school stopped. I had to put my thesis on hold, like other students.”

Most of the students were frustrated and felt a bit helpless given the situation. Students were texting each other about what they could do, if anything, as they all wanted to be involved in something.

When news came out that hospitals were running out of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), many professional engineers, also side-lined and forced to work at home, began developing PPE face shields and masks. Schneidau and many of her fellow U of L engineering students saw a way to get involved.

“Because I was working in 3D printing, we looked into how we could help,” she says. “It started with us using our at-home 3D printers printing face shield adapters which then turned into a partnership with a local injection molding house. We printed 80,000 injection molded face shields through this community. We would print and then go to the drop off sites that we set up, and drop off the shields. Then we put in place a socially distanced production line. I learned a lot about manufacturing from this because I was basically the person in charge of managing it.”

Schneidau feels she gained a lot of understanding in leadership and communication through this experience. In one example, some members on her team wanted to change how the face shields were fastened to the head band. They learned that they could not simply make a change, as operators at their service bureau taught them how such a change would affect the production process.

“This experience taught us to understand the whole production process,” she says. “To this day, it’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. And it’s also one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. Not only did the project distract me from what was going on, it made me feel like I actually was impacting something greater than myself, and I got to meet so many different people from all across the university. I learned a lot about being a leader and communicating with other engineers.”

As a fairly recent graduate, Schneidau is one of the young additive manufacturing engineers coming into the business world. Asked about what she likes best about this field, she finds in difficult to pick out one aspect, but she narrowed it down to innovation and community.

“With additive, we’re really able to express what’s going on in our brain and push the boundaries, push the limitations of what is actually possible, blending engineering and artistic approaches when you’re developing a product. That’s one of the cool things about additive is the innovative capabilities that you have.”

Schneidau was awarded the Guy E. Bourdeau Scholarship during the 2020 AMUG conference. She was able to attend the 2021 conference once the major wave of the COVID virus passed. At the conference, she found a community of like-minded engineers and used this opportunity to create a network of friends with many of the attendees.

“It’s like a family in itself. I have to say, three of my best friends within additive I’ve met at AMUG,” she said.

“The nature of design engineering has changed to where it’s much more collaborative, thus needing strong communication skills.”

Building relationships
Schneidau now works at a company where collaboration efforts between coworkers are highly valued. But she’s witnessed how a lack of collaborative relationships affect men and women in the work place.

“I don’t want to put any company on the spot, but if you join a very large corporation, you’re basically working to meet specific needs. So, you’ll put your head down and just work towards the company’s goals. But what do you get out of it? How are you bettering yourself to build your own career? I have worked in a large corporation and realized it wasn’t for me. It didn’t offer much room for collaboration with my coworkers to meet specific company goals,” she said.

Relationships have helped Schneidau become more open. She says she would have been considered shy as recently as five years ago. But through her journey with additive technology and the various roles she’s taken in her career, she’s learned to be more communicative.

“I build relationships because I like to understand all the different scenarios. I talk to as many people as possible now. When I got into school, I realized that a lot of the other female engineers thought similarly. Communication is 100% one of the most important skills to have to work well with somebody.”

Her perspective now is that while communication issues still arise, it has less to do with the different perspectives male and female engineers bring to a design challenge and instead is “more of a managerial problem.”

“The nature of design engineering has changed,” she adds, “to where it’s much more collaborative, thus needing strong communication skills.”

Getting comfortable
Many women engineers report a number of challenges that they face in the corporate world including being taken seriously, finding growth opportunities, dealing with imposter syndrome, and trusting that they know what they know.

For Schneidau, a challenge she is currently facing, one many women engineers relate to—is trusting your gut.

“There was one issue among several recent ones that showed a common theme,” she says. “Confidence and trusting my gut. I sometimes still struggle with trusting my judgement on some projects but that’s the great thing about an engineering challenge, the constant iteration and testing of new approaches to refine and improve my own thought process. The opportunities I’ve had to collaborate with others and their different perspectives has helped, because the best engineering solutions are from a collection of experiences applied to one possible scenario.”

In Schneidau’s present position, she is one of two women in the department. However, her colleague is not an engineer — she has an artist background.

“We each bring something different to the table that breaks up the traditional engineering mindset,” Schneidau said. “While I have an engineering mindset, she has the exact same knowledge on a situation, but she brings a new perspective. It’s been really interesting. In my past jobs, whether engineering or not, it’s always been difficult to have people accept a different perspective.”

Schneidau seeks out different perspectives, even though there are challenges here. “When I’m in a new situation, the hardest thing has been getting people to understand the way I think. But it’s helped me evolve because my mind is constantly moving in a million directions. I do see that it’s a challenge for people to accept the different perspectives that women bring to the table.” Like many women engineers report, she has had her share of being assigned to take notes for a team of mostly men.

Building her businesses
But she refuses to be defined by others’ limited views of her role. Even before she obtained her master’s, Schneidau had ambitious plans. She sees a problem, and she uses her problem-solving skills to address it, even to the point of creating new businesses.

She is CEO and founder of two companies and is involved in a third. The first company is Mod Man Technologies, which she started as an undergrad with two of her friends. They designed a prototype machine that is a modular desktop manufacturing machine with interchangeable 3D printing, milling, laser engraving, slash cutting, and injection molding features.

“We noticed in our engineering classes that we had to use a separate machine for each function,” she said. “And those machines are expensive and there’s not a lot of money available through grants or funds for many education institutions to purchase them. Our goal was to have a desktop machine that was small but built for education use that we could sell for less than a thousand dollars. And have everything integrated into it, including all the software in one package.”

“We convinced our department chair to let us do this as our senior design project. In five months, we went from idea to functioning prototype. Then we recruited some computer science students to help us with the software.”

They continue to iterate the prototype while working on a number of other projects.

Another company for Schneidau focuses on solving the workforce development need in the additive manufacturing industry. Her company will help educate students about this industry.

“One of my passions in additive is workforce development,” she says. “I’ve trained and taught many students while I was at university. I knew that with this rapid growth of 3D printing, especially during COVID, that many businesses would struggle to hire technicians and process engineers for additive projects. To me, there needs to be a curriculum that can be shared with K through 12 students, especially young girls. The initial approach was for general education in engineering, but why stop there? There are so many other capabilities for 3D printing. So instead of focusing solely on engineering, why not design it for the entire STEAM area?”

“So, now it’s turned into a curriculum for STEAM application for K through 12 with the intent on having modern man-machines integrated so that students can learn and modify the machine. I am working on my first few sets of curricula and building relationships with teachers within my mom’s school district and also within some of my friend’s school districts. The company is called Kettle because a kettle generates steam.”

Schneidau’s third company is a service center for small businesses, high school students, and entrepreneurs who want to try out 3D printing technology. She works with customers on designing concepts. This company is modeled a bit after Etsy, to print small production lots and help customers begin to sell their product and establish their own businesses.

A love of learning
Schneidau has long been active to helping younger students develop a love of learning.

“When I was at U of L, we had a type of ‘summer camp’ for students in underdeveloped counties in Kentucky. For a week, high-school students came to campus and experienced the city. They got to see what college life was like, and we gave them a Shark Tank type of learning opportunity,” she said.

“We put them into groups, assigned them roles and had them pick an item or an idea that they would turn into a product. They had a week to design it in CAD, print out their components, assemble and then pitch the product to a panel of experts. All of the students who had had very limited access to these tools took it and ran. I remember one group struggled with the product assembly part for their idea. They wanted to use 3D printing so I suggested they print it as one part. They didn’t realize they could do that. I showed them how to design a gap in the part so that when it prints, it’s nearly fully assembled. They were so amazed at what 3D printing could do, and I thought, ‘that’s why I do this.’ 3D printing can be such an aid to entice people into engineering because they can see immediate results. By the way, the winning group made cupholders for cars that wouldn’t spill during driving.”

Schneidau can relate to young high-school girls getting teased for liking math and science. It’s one of the reasons she enjoys teaching younger students about engineering.

“I was picked on for liking those subjects. And it does something to you. But I was fortunate, a lot of my friends were also good at math and enjoyed science. For those that weren’t good with math, I was able to help. And that taught me about collaboration. Sometimes people forget that for a 14- or 15-year-old girl who likes math and science, it can be a little lonely,” she said. “I know so many other people who wanted to help their dads with cars and get grease under their nails, but who weren’t necessarily allowed to. They could have gone into engineering too.”

Schneidau has found a place for all her creativity, problem-solving skills, and her drive and ambition.

 

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Filed Under: Engineering Diversity & Inclusion

 

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