Beth Carroll: Materials Maverick

Beth Carroll could have chosen any number of careers, from music (she plays six different instruments, from drums to bassoon) to construction (she spent summers before college as a land surveyor) to carpentry (she has paid her rent through college by renovating an old apartment building). Her love for building and hands-on work made her a natural candidate for a career in civil engineering, which is where Beth thought she was heading when she arrived at Drexel. A two-day survey class for freshmen in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering caught her eye. She took the class and was introduced to the world of materials, including such highlights as a demonstration with a blowtorch to illustrate the ability of certain ceramics to stand up to intense temperatures. Beth has been a Materials Scientist ever since, and the field is lucky to have her.

This fall, Beth successfully defended her thesis on Carbide-Derived-Carbon under Dr. Yury Gogotsi's guidance and graduated with Honors from Drexel's challenging BS/MS program. In just five years, she was able to complete both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Materials Science and Engineering.

She is now working full-time for Orthovita, Inc., a medical devices company, with whom she co-oped twice during her career at Drexel. During her co-op experiences, Beth developed on-the-job skills that most new graduates have not yet honed and proved herself so valuable to her supervisors at Orthovita that they created a new position just for her. Now that Beth is a full-time employee, her days are filled with lab-time, meetings, reading up on the latest developments in the field, and writing up technical reports. Sound a lot like school? It is, she says, except that at the end of the day, "I get to go home and forget about it instead of thinking about the latest homework assignment or paper to write or thesis to worry about." Some days are longer than others though, because Beth has an expertise in micrography that she gained during her studies at Drexel that many of the other Orthovita employees do not have. As a result, she has become an unofficial "technical shrink" for the company. Beth does not mind this extra work though—she says that it is one of the unexpected payoffs of her time with Drexel's MSE department. She said she knew that she was gaining a solid foundation in Materials theory and applications, but "never anticipated the popularity I would gain as the technical shrink!"