Set your targets and plan to achieve them. The road towards your goals will always be wavy, shaky, and bouncy. Try to remain focused, positive, and patient. Always be the best version of yourself in contributing to society and the world. You are a role model for other girls who want careers in STEM.
I have always been interested in performing tasks through devices to save time. My curiosity encouraged me to pursue a career in science and technology. Electrical engineering and optics equipped me to use light for building optical devices, which help solve various healthcare, agriculture, and food industry problems.
I am a PhD student and researcher in photonics and optics. I work on optical sensors with applications in the agriculture and healthcare sectors. I am also a faculty member in the electrical engineering department of a public-sector women’s university, where I teach optics and supervise the graduate and undergraduate students’ research projects.
As a teacher I feel a great responsibility to educate and inspire through my professional career and achievements. I also encourage and guide my students to pursue their dreams of being female scientists and engineers, to break the cultural norms of disparity in career options for girls.
The first obstacle I faced was choosing engineering as my career. I belong to a culture in which it’s much more acceptable for women to be medical doctors than engineers. But my parents, mainly my father, supported me in studying electrical engineering. The other obstacle I faced was stress arising from working in multiple domains simultaneously—research, career, personal life—especially when I lost my mother in the third year of my PhD. Being a married woman with two daughters, managing my research and family simultaneously was challenging. But I learned to be emotionally stable for the things I don’t have, and fulfilled my responsibilities with good time-management.
For women, a career in engineering and technology is challenging, even in today’s modern world. But the kind of independence of performing research tasks and making innovative devices that you have in STEM can be found in no other field.
Faiza Iftikhar
PhD Student, Department of Electrical Engineering, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
Born in Pakistan / Lives in Pakistan
Educational Background: BS and MS in Electrical Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Lahore, Pakistan
