Question: how long have you worked as an engineer?

Charlotte Slade answered on 10 Mar 2025:

I’ve been working as a scientist-engineer hybrid for around 5 years – but my journey started WAY before that! 🚀

I was totally THAT kid who drove my parents crazy by constantly taking apart everything in sight and trying to put them back together. Remote control? Taken apart. Random pen in class? Dismantled. My sister’s talking doll? Definitely investigated! 😂 I just had to understand how things worked.

As I grew up, that curiosity never went away. Instead, it turned into a passion for science and technology. I studied physics and materials science, which was basically a fancy way of learning how to solve really cool puzzles about how the world works.

Now, I get to design scientific instruments that help researchers make incredible discoveries. Imagine creating tools that let scientists see things thousands of times smaller than a human hair – how cool is that?

It’s like I’m still that curious kid, just with better tools and a lab coat! I feel incredibly lucky to have turned my childhood obsession with ‘how does this work?’ into a career that lets me explore, create, and solve problems every single day.