Profile

Jill Benware graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and was hired fresh out of college by a private company to design plastic injection molding-machines, an achievement by itself. But two years later, Benware felt she needed something more.

"The jobs I wanted, I didn't have the skills for," she says, "so I decided to apply to a master's program. I saw the UMBC mechanical engineering graduate program as a way to get back to what I initially liked."

After being accepted into the mechanical engineering program at UMBC and meeting her advisor, Dr. Charles Eggleton, Jill Benware got back to the basics - her original interest of fluid dynamics, a subject she finds difficult yet rewarding.

"It's challenging, it's hard, it's interesting. It's all around you, you see it everywhere. And it's powerful to be able to understand," she says. Her current master's research focuses on the stir-volumes of chemical storage tanks using the Navier-Stokes equation, research useful to pharmaceutical and chemical companies who rely on such equations to produce massive quantities of chemicals safely.

Yet UMBC opened opportunities for Jill Benware she had not previously considered, such as the science of education. Through UMBC's Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT), she found out about ESTEEM, an after-school program run directly by UMBC faculty and funded by the National Science Foundation. ESTEEM, which stands for Enhancing Science and Technology Education and Exploration Mentoring, is a partnership between CWIT, the Shriver Center at UMBC and the Chabot Space and Science Center. The program is designed specifically to interest women in science, taking a hands-on, non-lecture approach geared to the physical more than theoretical side.

"This week we're taking apart cameras to understand how they work," says Benware, who signed on as an instructor to work at Corkran Middle School. "Next week we're putting together phones."

Now that she is completing her master's, Benware believes she has more career options. "I have accepted a position at Alden in Holden, Massachusetts where my work will focus on computational flow modeling," she says, her primary area of interest. Still, she has not finished her education. "I am going back into the workforce, but I don't think I'm done taking classes. There is just too much that I haven't learned."