My first post for Stem Geeks

Source

Hello, everyone

After a few suggestions from some friends at LeoFinance, I finally decided to write my first post for STEM Geeks. In this post, I'll tell a little bit about me and how I got to be interested in STEM-related topics.

I'm a chemical engineer from Brazil and even though nowadays I work more with project management, I'm still passionate about STEM-related subjects, especially energy, which was my favorite topic in university. Here is a little bit of my story:

Growing up

I was very fortunate as a child because my parents were avid readers and so we had a lot of books in our house. Reading really turned me into a very curious person and I believe that's what sparked my interest in science.

When I was 10, I got my first chemistry set and a microscope as presents from relatives, and for a long time I would spend most of my days in my room doing those fun experiments in chemistry our outside looking for interesting stuff to analyze with my microscope.

Source

The years went by and eventually, it was time to choose what kind of career I wanted to pursue in college. It was very clear to me that I wanted to be a chemist but then, during a professions fair I found out about the chemical engineering path. At that time it sounded like Chemistry on steroids so I decided I wanted to be a chemical engineer.

University

It turned out that I was wrong in my assumption. While chemistry and chemical engineering have some similarities, they are essentially very different careers. However, that was a fortunate mistake because I also found out that I had a lot more affinity for chemical engineering than pure chemistry.

Of all the many topics that are covered in the course, energy was the most appealing to me. I took several optional classes on that subject and in my last year, when I had to choose a topic for my final assignment, I decided to design a solar power plant using Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) which was a very new technology at that time.

Source
(not my project, just an example of what a CSP plant looks like)

I'm very proud of that project and it was very well received among my peers as well and that's one of the reasons why I still am very interested in energy to this day.

Professional life

While I was still in university I found out about another thing that became one of my passions: project management. I dove deep into that universe and ended up getting a job as a junior PMO assistant. On that job, I had the opportunity to help manage projects for several industries such as oil, IT, logistics, and a few others. More recently though, I switched to ed-tech, and currently, I only manage projects that aim to bring technology and innovation to schools all over my country.

Hive

In January this year I found out about Hive and I was really impressed by the community that we have here. I became one of the top engagers in the LeoFinance community and after some people there found out about my chemical engineering background they suggested I check out this community so here I am.

This was only an introduction post but I plan to be more active here and write a little a bit about energy and other topics that I find interesting, such as AI and space exploration. I hope to get to you know all better and until next time!

Posted with STEMGeeks