I am a chemical engineer by background. I chose this career path before I graduated high school. When I was a sophomore I took Chemistry for the first time and fell in love. The summer after my sophomore year, I participated in an early engineering program called INSPIRE hosted at the University of Louisville. It exposed me to all types of engineering opportunities and I really felt this was the area for me (up until that point at my high school I was an English major planning on becoming a English teacher when I grew up). After that experience I changed my high school major to Math, took a second year of Chemistry and enrolled in another summer program called SummerTech at Auburn University. After that summer, I realized that although the electrical components of engineering were interesting I like the chemistry a bit more so when I began applying for college the following fall, I applied as a Chemical Engineering major. During college at Washington University in St. Louis, I had the opportunity to have 2 very diverse summer internships that exposed me to different areas were my major could be applied (fabric manufacturing for cigarette tow/pharmaceuticals) that I knew I had made the right decision of choosing chemical engineering. Upon graduation, I went into an entirely different field and joined a cryogenics company as a cryogenic applications engineer. After about 5 years I was ready for a career change and joined BP as a process engineer at one of the chemical plants in TX. In my 20 years at BP I have held a variety of Engineering and Leadership roles across our chemical, refining and upstream businesses all because of my chemical engineering background