As a child, Margaret felt a little bit different from other kids. For starters, she was horse crazy. Lucky for her, Margaret’s extended family owned a farm and so on holidays, she spent her days shadowing her Aunt Jenny who bred horses. Margaret’s best days included riding horses, brushing horses, feeding horses, and cleaning up after horses. When it got too dark to do anything horse related, Margaret moved indoors for dinner. At night, her aunts and uncles would sit around the table talking long after the meal was finished. These nights on the farm would turn out to have an everlasting impact on her.

In those days, children didn’t really join in adult conversations, so Margaret listened and soaked up the discussions about how to make things work better on the farm. She loved that all the adults had an equal say. While Aunty Jenny did the horses, her uncles were in charge of crops and Aunty Anne was in charge of the beef cattle. Both aunts also ran the sheep. Much of the talk was about water. The family farm depended on water from the nearby river. Her aunts and uncles spent many hours talking about how to make the best use of the water and how to engineer improvements on the farm.

Before long, Margaret’s parents moved the family to the United Kingdom. There, she met another uncle for the first time. The uncle asked her what she wanted to be.

‘An engineer,’ she said. In her mind, an engineer was a problem solver. Someone who could look at any situation logically and think of ways to improve it.

He laughed. ‘Oh, you can come around and fix my car.’

Margaret was offended – mostly because even though she was a child, she knew that an engineer wasn’t someone who just knew their way around a car engine. An engineer was so much more.

While Margaret and her family were in the UK, they got a lot of postcards from their farming family back home, only the postcards were from Fiji, not Australia. Turned out, her family kept winning holidays to Fiji because every year, their crops won the best-crop prize in the annual Kellogg’s competition. Her aunts and uncles had used all those long evening discussions to problem-solve ways to find the most effective ways to grow crops. Margaret was fascinated with what they had done. They used laser levelling to plough their fields to the correct height to maximise the water use. They ploughed their field on a slight slope so that the water could run down channels and water the plants. There were pipes in each furrow.

Margaret was home-schooled for a couple of years and returned to the classroom when she was 14. Being away from school for so long gave her a new enthusiasm and love for learning. She especially loved science and physics. By the time she was 16, she took pride in repairing her own things. In one physics class, Margaret noticed something unusual. All the girls were gathered around the front bench watching a prac.

One of the girls turned to her and said, ‘I don’t understand this!’

Other girls quickly agreed. But Margaret was puzzled. These were clever girls. They were good at logic and problem solving, but it looked like they bowed out. She wondered if it was a confidence thing rather than an intelligence thing because they were all capable – they just didn’t think they were. And that made all the difference. Margaret has always wondered if there was a moment in that particular lesson where things could have gone a different way and changed things for those other girls.

When Margaret finally made it to university to study engineering, she chose to study at a place that had a woman as one of the professors. Even so, at the first lecture, only around ten per cent of the students were girls.

One thing that Margaret noticed is that much of engineering was about what you build but she always thought that a better approach was about how it can help people. There’s a difference between a discussion on how a high-speed helicopter is designed, to a discussion on the features a high-speed helicopter needs so it can rescue people faster. When the focus changes, engineers have a better chance to change the world. It’s not about the invention, but about how the invention is used; impact as well as construction. This is what makes a true engineer.

Professor Margaret Jollands completed a PhD in plastics engineering. After working for a multi-national company in Germany, she returned to Australia and became an academic in the RMIT School of Engineering.

Professor Margaret Jollands recommends any STEM activities that you can do at home.

• Dissolve spoons of salt in a cup of water and test whether it dissolves evenly in hot or ice water. You can also test to see if there’s a point where the salt stops dissolving.
• You can experiment mixing oil and water. Does it mix?
• If you have a prism, shine light through it, then shine light through a glass of water then through the prism. What happens to the light?
• Find out why your feet look like they are sticking out at strange angles when you sit on the side of a pool and put them in the water.

Google experiments you can do safely at home. Anything you do will help you develop a love of Science, and of course, your curiosity.