OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — An Overland Park native is among 350 students nationwide who received a $10,000 scholarship from Lockheed Martin to pursue a STEM career.
"From a very young age, I was watching Star Trek and Star Wars, and I really enjoyed the aerospace space travel aspects of it and that kind of made want to become an aerospace engineer," said Lindsey Chiu, a Shawnee Mission South High School alumna. "I think that by like becoming an aerospace engineer I would also help push technology further because most of our new technology is through space and that kind of research."
Chiu continues to motivate herself time and again to go after what she wants.
“If you keep working at it, believing in yourself, you will be able to accomplish many things,” she said.
That’s the advice Chiu continues to tell herself while following her dreams at Georgia Tech University, where she plans to pursue a career as an aerospace engineer.
“I just saw I won this giant scholarship, and I was on the verge of crying it was great," Chiu said. "My mom was screaming and it was a fun time."
Coming from a single-parent household, Chiu and her mother also felt a sense of relief knowing they would not have to worry about fully paying for school.
“We were unsure if we were able to pay for like the last year of college, so with the scholarship we were definitely able to afford it and it’s definitely a big weight being lifted off my shoulders,” Chiu said.
While she is excited about the next four years at her dream school, Chiu said she's also thankful for the past four years at Shawnee Mission South, where she participated in robotics and other STEM-focused.
“It just really helped me find out that I really love putting things together and designing things," Chiu said. "I was one of two or three girls in there out of the entire team, so that was a little discouraging. But I really enjoyed it so I kept going with it."
And it was inside the classroom at Shawnee Mission School District’s Center for Academic Achievement where Chiu's former engineering instructor, Jessica Tickle, said Chiu had the perfect solution to every problem.
“She just grew in every one of those classes," Tickle said. "You could see of all the synapsis in her brain making connections with different ideas and her passion just started, but she was still small and quiet."
During Chiu's time at the Center for Academic Achievement, she designed a jet engine on the computer software, which Tickle said displayed her "understanding of aerodynamic principals and propulsion."
Now on the way to living her dream, Chiu's key to success starts with not letting anything stand in the way of her goals so she can make a future for young women of tomorrow.
“She has confidence, but it’s not over bearing and is not in your face," Tickle said. "Strong poise. Engineering and computer science are male-dominant fields, but that does not phase her at all."
Women, according to Chiu, are the future of both technology and society.
“Technology is definitely going to move us forward in life," she said. "It’s a little discouraging at times, but in the end it’s completely worth it."
