RAMSEYER IS KEEPING AN EYE OUT FOR OPPORTUNITY
Ask Jenny Ramseyer for career advice and she says, “Try everything. Figure out what you like in STEM and try to do that. You don’t always get to do what you love. But if you keep your eye out for any cool opportunities, you can find something that will appeal to your interests and that you will enjoy more than you thought you would.” Simply put, follow your passions, even if they appear to present narrow career opportunities, such as Ramseyer’s interest in the mathematics of origami. Yet, as Ramseyer’s own story shows, passion is an important part of a journey.
Ramseyer first became interested in origami when she was a child living in Japan. It became her hobby, something she did on trains to pass the time. When the family moved back to Lexington, Massachusetts, Ramseyer also became interested in robotics and formed a FIRST LEGO League (FLL) team with neighborhood friends and her brother. Some of the parents, including Ramseyer’s father and, for that initial year, her mother, served as coaches. For a few years, the team worked on different challenges, designing modifiable MINDSTORMS robots to tackle the different obstacles on the table-sized field. FLL was when she realized that math wasn’t something you just learned in the classroom. In FLL, you could apply it and have fun with it.
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