When I was 16 years old, my physics teacher called me over in the hall between classes. “You’ve got a free period after lunch, right?” he asked. “Come meet some people from Ohio State who want to start a robotics team here.”

The meeting itself wasn’t momentous, but the effect it had on my life was. A FIRST robotics team at my all-girls high school meant that for the first time in my life, I got to learn about what engineering really was. I liked math, I liked science, I had a lot of nerdy interests, so I had a vague idea that I should therefore be an engineer, but I didn’t really know any engineers. I had none in my family. It wasn’t a common job to have in the area I grew up. It wasn’t until my FIRST mentors – all engineering students at the Ohio State University – showed me everything they knew about programming, system design, electronics, and machining that I started to understand. And beyond just understanding it, I fell in love with it. I wanted to build robots forever.

One of the things I love about working in robotics is that every job means I have to learn about a totally new business. The core technology might be the same, but the way it’s applied across different verticals – defense, telecommunications, logistics, manufacturing, etc – completely changes the approach you need to take in developing the technology. It keeps it interesting, and it keep me humble. I’m an expert in robotics technology, but I have a lot to learn from others who’ve spent their careers in the domains I’m trying to apply the technology to.

I also love how multidisciplinary it is. Technology journalist Christopher Mims once described robotics teams as needing to be like an “Ocean’s Eleven” team of different skillsets that all come together to successfully pull off a heist. Robotics is a complex systems engineering problem where many disciplines have to collaborate and co-design to be successful, and for someone like me who love dabbling in multiple engineering domains throughout college, that’s very satisfying. It’s a great place for a Jack (or Jane) of all trades.

And robotics is, at its core, a counterintuitively human field to be in. Work on robots long enough and you’ll gain a deep new appreciation for the incredible capabilities of human beings that we often take for granted. Robotics requires us to examine our own understanding of work, of value, of thought, of consciousness, and of trust. Good robots are made or broken by whether they’re designed with an understanding of humanity in mind. Business value is made or lost not by how well a robot does by itself, but by how well a robot can work with and for the people around it.

For someone who is now doing exactly what she decided to do at age 16, my career path has in many ways been the result of luck, not planning. I attended Olin College of Engineering as a member of their first graduating class, and in the days before Robotics majors existed, I floated between software engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering before graduating with an ECE degree. I intended to go to grad school but was a terrible applicant, so went straight into industry. At a series of jobs at small companies and startups I got to try out quality and test engineering, systems engineering, electrical engineering, program management, and product management, and my multidisciplinary background was a valuable asset that let me flex across those roles. As a side hustle, I was a writer for the IEEE Spectrum magazine’s robotics blog, Automaton, and for the Robotics Business Review, which gave me a reason to network with and interview all kinds of experts and leaders throughout the industry and learn from them. After a while at these smaller companies, I decided it would be useful to see what robotics at scale looked like, so I joined Amazon Robotics and led the development of Proteus, Amazon’s first AMR product. Last year I was recruited for the advanced manufacturing robotics team at General Motors, which has given me another opportunity to learn about doing robotics at large scale in the new-to-me world of automotive manufacturing. Each job change has been a combination of a serendipitous opportunity and genuine curiosity about the world and the role robotics can play in it. Each instance of serendipity has built on the networking I did early in my career. My career path has been less about a concrete career development plan and more about positioning myself to learn about opportunities and being willing to risk failing at something new.

I was fortunate enough to join the robotics industry at a time where there were already brilliant, successful women visible in research and business, so while I was often the only woman in a conference room, I at least knew I wasn’t alone in the industry. Gender balance and inclusivity in the robotics world have improved dramatically since I started my career and the number of amazing women to look up to continues to grow. But we all know it can still be better. I take my responsibility as a senior level woman in robotics very seriously. Those of us senior enough to feel job security and privilege need to continue to push for the cultural changes we want to see in the workplace and the industry. It’s not enough to exist as a role model or to mentor other women through sexism. We have to be the change.