MONEY

Granville graduate turns love of STEM into a career

Maria DeVito
Reporter

NEWARK - Kelsey Riffle’s love for math and science started when she was kid.

It was a natural choice to turn that love into a career.

“I always wanted to solve problems and figure out why things were the way they were,” she said.

The 2014 Granville High School graduate is spending the summer interning with ArcelorMittal, world’s leading steel producer, in Burns Harbor, Indiana.

Her love of problem solving has led her to working with steel, which she hopes to continue doing once she graduates. Riffle, who is studying materials science and engineering, will be a senior at Ohio State University in the fall.

“Part of what I think is really interesting is looking at the steel inside and finding defects in it,” she said. “Just kind of going back through the process to figure out where the defect started.”

As a kid, Riffle frequently went to The Works in downtown Newark to explore her interests, and then went on to volunteer with The Works.

Her favorite part is volunteering with children’s camps.

“I really like seeing their ideas come to life,” Riffle said. “They come up with these ideas that are completely different and new and you never would have thought of and I think it’s just really neat to see the way that their minds work.”

This coming academic year, Riffle will be the president of Ohio State’s chapter of Society of Women Engineers.

“One of the biggest goals of the organization is to support women within engineering and really get more women to stay involved in engineering fields and not be intimidated by how many men there are,” she said.

Riffle said the organization is a resource women can use when they are negotiating salaries or working through problems they might have.

Because it’s an international organization, Riffle said she has met women from all over the world who have shared their experiences of working in the field.

Most of Riffle’s close friends are a part of the group.

“It’s a really good network of people to branch out to and talk to and just have people to study with or just hang out with.”

Even though Riffle’s passion is engineering, she said STEM goes so far beyond that. People can be scientists working in a research lab or a computer programmer writing code.

“There’s so many different ways that STEM can take people that I think it’s a really great field to get into,” she said.

mdevito@gannett.com

740-328-8513

Twitter: @MariaDeVito13

About the series

This story is part of an ongoing Business Advocate series about women in STEM careers. If you have a story suggestion, email advocate@newarkadvocate.com