Debi Rickard (Dronge)

CCNY had an excellent reputation, and they offered an engineering program. It was also close. After high school I went to Northwestern University. My father paid a fortune to send me to the first private school I ever went to in my life. I was a New Yorker, born and raised. When I got out of Northwestern with a major in music and a minor in psychology, I worked with autistic kids for about six months. However, I couldn't let the emotional stress of that job go when I went home. I stopped doing that and I worked for ten years, trying a few different jobs. My longest job was as a Mercedes mechanic for about six years, which I loved, but my mother wasn't happy with that. What could she tell her friends? That her daughter's a mechanic? I was then hired by Chevrolet because they were looking for a female college graduate who was a mechanic, and there aren't many of those. They put me in one of their dealerships after six months of training, and I lasted two years before the stress of being a Chevrolet service writer got to me. At that point my mother actually convinced me to go back to school for an engineering degree, so I went to CCNY. I had taken a couple of evening courses after work to see if I could still handle being in school, which I could. I was hired by Grumman Aerospace during my last semester at CCNY. They offered me three different positions, and I chose to work in the reliability and maintainability department so I didn't spend the rest of my life designing water pumps. I got to work on anything new that was being developed. Being at CCNY was so much more fulfilling, and I received such a thorough education there. I never went home from CCNY without having all of my questions answered. The professors and their assistants were wonderful there, so much so that I graduated with eight A-pluses and the rest were A's. I discovered that being an engineer was exactly how my brain worked!