SAN ANTONIO – Lanier high school senior Penelope Maldonado isn’t afraid to take charge and fix things herself. And she does so in a predominantly male class.
She is president of her school’s robotics team that she recently led to winning a city-wide electric car race.
“She’s just, like, super driven,” Jeremy Rios, engineering teacher at Lanier High School said. ”Whatever is put in front of her, she just, like...boom... runs with it.”
Rios said having a female student like her is rare, and hopes she can encourage more into the robotics/engineering field.
“She’s like a good role model for that, because like she can she can help like other, like other girls come in and just like, like stand up and like, hey, like, no, this is the stems of feel that you can go into,” Rios said.
Penelope said she would have never thought of engineering and robotics as something she would’ve enjoyed if it wasn’t for a free stem-robotics summer camp put on at the University of Incarnate Word when she was in eighth grade.
It was other young women mentors in STEM that encouraged her. She hopes to do the same to get more girls involved in what she loves.
“I would say that it’s fun,” Penelope said. “It’s not just a boys thing, it’s you can if they can do it, you can do it too.”
Next year she earned a full ride to study aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University. She will be the first in her family to go to college. She says her family is very excited for her opportunity.
“I want to work on rockets and spaceships,” she said. “I guess try to fly somewhere to the moon in my own rocket and stuff like that.”
She said once she has gotten to go to NASA she still has big dreams to conquer, like running her own engineering company for other women just like her.
“I guess to have my own company, I guess to build it up just for females, just have an all-female company and engineering goes in business and all that,” she said.