FAMU grad Mareena Robinson Snowden made headlines in 2017 when she became the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since then, she’s worked to pave a pathway for more women and minorities to follow in her footsteps.“I think it’s tremendously important to have this diversity of voices, not just from a cultural perspective or from a gender perspective, but just lived experience,” Snowden said. “…There is blood and treasure on the line with respect with the decisions that [nuclear engineers] make, and we’re actually sending people out to fight wars if things go wrong.”
Her FAMU story
The 33 year-old Miami, FL native was accepted into the undergraduate business program at FAMU on a Presidential Scholarship. Snowden thought she had her future all figured out: She would go to law school and become an attorney, like her father, or else a businesswoman.
Her father was sold on the program, telling her: “Mareena, I don’t know anything about this physics stuff. I can’t do one equation. But I feel like this is the wave of the future and I just need you to try it. Just give it a shot.”
Fast forward
Snowden now lives in Washington, D.C. and works as a senior engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in neighboring Maryland. Just eight months into the job, and now with a 7-month-old daughter, she’s settling into the first workplace she can call home after two year-long fellowships at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and National Nuclear Security Administration.
The 33 year-old Miami, FL native was accepted into the undergraduate business program at FAMU on a Presidential Scholarship. Snowden thought she had her future all figured out: She would go to law school and become an attorney, like her father, or else a businesswoman.
But when she and her father arrived on campus at the beginning of freshman year, he made an offer the self-described “obedient daughter” couldn’t refuse: to pay a visit to the physics department, where he had a distant connection to a friend-of-a-friend.
“I said, ‘OK, I’ll just check it out,’” Snowden says. “I had no intention of going into physics. But when I got up there they treated me like a football player.”
She was surprised — after all, the department didn’t know anything about her, and had no idea whether she could cut it as a physics major. “They were so excited about anybody who was even willing to talk about the possibility of doing science because it is a select few people who have the audacity to try something like that,” she says.
Her father was sold on the program, telling her: “Mareena, I don’t know anything about this physics stuff. I can’t do one equation. But I feel like this is the wave of the future and I just need you to try it. Just give it a shot.”
“I said, ‘What’s the problem? I’ll try it for a year, and if I hate it, I’ll switch.’ And then I looked up and I was a junior,” Snowden says.
Snowden now lives in Washington, D.C. and works as a senior engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in neighboring Maryland. Just eight months into the job, and now with a 7-month-old daughter, she’s settling into the first workplace she can call home after two year-long fellowships at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and National Nuclear Security Administration.
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Editors note: This story first appeared on Rattler Nation on September 12, 2020.