Hi My name is Ashley Woodward. I'm a senior. I will be graduating this spring, and I study mining and minerals engineering. I don't know if it was the first meeting, but the first few I could tell that she was, um, definitely a go-getter. Is that OK terminology? She was a go-getter. She was passionate. She was very, very smart, but she was very driven. I could tell that right away. So, she took initiative. I chose Virginia Tech because of its great engineering program. That was definitely the number one draw when I was looking for schools. I also was considering military service, so the Corps Cadets here is something that's super unique to our school. Having a Senior Military Academy at a school that offers, like, also one of the best engineering programs on the East Coast, kind of was like a double whammy and made it an easy choice to choose Virginia Tech. And then that freshman year, when I started exploring the different majors, mining really attracted me because it also had the same versatility that mechanical has. You could do chemical processing, if you like chemistry. They also had some really big, cool machines. Mining is kind of known for that. Everything, the bigger the better in our industry. And so that really drew me and with that, I kind of decided, you know, I think mining is something I'm interested in? Well, I think it's mining itself is kind of interdisciplinary, because to be in to be in mining to run a mine, you know, whether it be a surface or underground, there's a lot of different sort of disciplines that go into that, including civil. Civil engineering, geoscience, geology classes, um, fluid mechanics, sort of classes that lead this sort of ventilation or moving water, moving things in the mine. So a mining engineer has a background in a bunch of different other disciplines. I was in the Corps of Cadets, my first two years, which was a great experience. I can say I learned a lot, and I definitely learned how to manage a super heavy schedule with the Corps of Cadets. But I was unfortunately medically disqualified my sophomore year. And it was, yeah, it was, it was a big turning point, kind of for my college career. I was very like set on, like, I'm coming in with an engineer, I'm gonna go into military service. That's what I'm going to do and kind of was thrown for a loop hole there. But like I said earlier, relating back to that freshman year, like, it's such a great collaborative community that I was given, like, all the tools where I was like: Okay, well, this isn't an option anymore, so what am I going to do next? And so as I was looking, I, you know, was thinking, you know, I still want service, I want to think of a way that I can still have those service-oriented goals that I was going to accomplish in the corps. And so I started looking into research and kind of came across, ah, working with a lot of my professors, and realize, you know, maybe I want to be a professor. I think that would be a really rewarding career path. I can have the feelings of like mentorship that you also get in military service and feel like I'm really contributing through research. So that was my hardest challenge was kind of pivoting and kind of, you know, reassessing all your goals, like halfway through college. But it is, you know, it's a continuous process. And I was lucky to figure out a excellent, excellent plan B. Recently, I have accepted an offer -- about a week ago -- I will be going to UC Berkeley, I was accepted into their Geosystems Ph.D. program. I could not be more thrilled for this opportunity. And the faculty I've been communicating with at the school, I'm already beyond excited. So that's gonna put me on the trajectory to become a professor and to do the research that I hope to do, which I'm hoping to focus on like hazard mitigation, specifically seismic performance. And I want to focus that on underserved populations and developing nations. So kind of tie it all back together there, trying to come full circle and make sure my research is also being of service
