Who designs and codes the PCBs? Meet a woman electronics engineer and find out how she works

Publication date: September 19, 2023

It is important for our students to learn about examples of STEM professionals involved in the world of designing and coding devices. More broadly, it is interesting to work with a professional who is close to us, from a localuniversity, who works in a place that is close to us or that we feel close to. This year I decided to look for a STEM professional who had a job and a really inspiring experience but who had also studied at our school. Certainly, for my students, meeting the example of a person who has been in the same class as them, who has studied with some of their teachers and who is now successfully developing their professional STEM career, has had a very positive impact. 

In order to get in touch with a former student who could collaborate in this way, it was important to talk to the parents’ organisation of my school. With this, I have been able to get in touch with the STEM professional who has delighted us with her professional experience. It has been very important because we have been able to organise this activity thanks to the collaboration of an important network of people who coexist in our school including teachers, parents, mothers, current students and former students. It has been a work developed in a very nice context and that highlights the importance of creating active communities in schools. At the beginning, the activity presented here only included one talk. But due to the success it had and the great enthusiasm of the students attending and listening to the experience of a STEM professional woman who has been a former student of our school, we were forced to plan this second talk.  It was difficult to organise this second session because of this person’s schedule, but with a little effort it was possible. 

Thanks to all of this, this year the students of the Blas Infante Secondary School in Cordoba, Spain, have had the opportunity to listen to the professional and academic experience of Natalia Párraga Benedí: an electronic engineer living in Budapest and working in the company REMRED Ltd. Natalia dedicates her work to the design of PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) that are integrated in different devices that are part of several space missions. 

Natalia’s work starts from the design of the electrical block diagram to the design of the printed circuit board itself, as well as writing all the necessary documentation related to the Hardware of the board.  During the Secondary Education period, Natalia told us about her experience studying in the field of Science and Technology and about what it was like to study the French Baccalaureate in Spain, Bachibac. This is a great opportunity for the students offered in our public school. In addition, Natalia highlighted that this provided her the possibility to develop her training, learning and improving her knowledge of different languages, which has been very important for her academic and professional career.  

At the University she studied an Electronic Engineering Degree, but Natalia pointed out that participating in extra-curricular activities and projects on different topics such as 3D printing, hardware design and engineering, coding, etc. helped her a lot and was very positively valued in the future interviews she had to access to a Master’s Degree and also for her current job. She stressed that as well as it is important to pass the different subjects of the university degree, in this academic development it is essential to get involved in other projects to learn what you really like and to meet and collaborate with people who have the same interest.  

Later, working in her current company REMRED, she participated in the design and test of an experiment part of the HEMERA project, a mission that launched a stratospheric balloon from the Arctic Circle to a maximum altitude of 36 km in order to analyse several considerations for the final design of a device that could take radiation data in space. 

Nowadays, she is participating in the design of a payload that will be on the Lunar Gateway, part of the ARTEMIS Project. A great success in her professional career and whose experience we have been able to know first-hand.

In addition to all her experience, Natalia gave the students several important advices: firstly, she talked about the need for more women to be part of the interdisciplinary teams that develop aerospace engineering work, encouraging girls to take more interest in this field by showing that they can achieve great goals. In addition, she emphasised the importance of everyone studying what they like the best, not what other people tell them they can or cannot do. She recommended to know many different things and many real examples because it will be very interesting and useful to help them to decide about their professional career, they should be fully involved in what they are curious and passionate about. 

Being a former student, the STEM professional who has come back to the school this year to talk about her professional experience, the activity has been much closer, inspiring and real. Despite being an “unknown” person to all of us, we felt that she was someone close to us, from our neighborhood, who has lived very similar experiences to mine. This was one of the most important points that made the activity a great success. This was evident in the feedback from the students, who, among other things, asked if one day she could visit the school. They said that they didn’t know how these devices were made, coded and designed and that it was very interesting indeed. But above all, it was very useful for them to know how Natalia had come to work on the projects she is involved in and what her academic career has been carried out. 

Without any doubt, it has been a wonderful, enriching and inspiring experience that we should repeat every year. We have seen that the network that we can create of STEM professionals with former students has a powerful impact on our current students that we must take advantage of in order to promote their interest in STEM careers.

The EU Code Week “Experts Go Back-to-school” Campaign is a competition that encourages school teachers and professionals working in tech industry and with digital technology (developers, technicians, scientists, engineers, researchers, but also entrepreneurs, digital creators, artists, game designers, employment and recruiting managers, etc.) to organise career talks and collaborative activities in schools or online, in English or in local languages.

The new Experts Go “Back-to-School” Campaign- Competition will run in September 2023. Stay tuned!