Meet Santha Krishnasamy
During her free time, Santha used to run STEM workshops for her community children from Grade 3 to High School. Here, children built a Robot that draws itself and a mobile car.
Santha Krishnasamy graduated with a Bachelor in Electronic Engineering from Barathiyar University, India in 1999, and a Masters in Business Administration from Indira Gandhi Open University, New Delhi in 2004. She has received a Management Credential from Harvard Business School in 2015 and a Google Certified Professional Data Engineer in 2019. She is currently the Founder and CEO of FourFront Insights, which is a virtual industry-led internship platform for emerging technologies. In her spare time, Santha enjoys building technology teams for innovative startups, working on IOT projects, kickboxing, cultural traveller, yoga and being a mindfulness facilitator.
When did your love of STEM begin?
At the age of 6, my chores are to clean the semi-automatic machine tools (we call them lathe then) and manual machine tools at my dad's factory. My dad was a Mechanical Engineer and an entrepreneur innovatively manufacturing submersible pump sets. My brother and I have to work in his factory to pay for our school fees. I never got to play with today in my childhood as I am always at my dad's factory playing with tools. This led us to be very creative and think out of the box at a young age. I always wanted to check the machining sizes of impellers, assemble the pumps, and my favourite thing is to log all the readings from different meters while the assembled pump set is tested under the water for performance. Some of the other things I do are goofing around with the tools and sneak them out of the team to check them myself, use the calibration tools to identify the measurements of tool bits and do the painting with the paint gun. When I was in my teenage years I helped my mom with business accounts which allowed me to apply the school math in real-time. My dad always believed that I'll be a good engineer while my mom was confident that I'll be better at entrepreneurship. Guess I mixed them both.
What is the best part about working in the field of STEM?
Being creative, cobbling together different solutions to a pressing problem in an innovative way, and empowering younger generations.
What advice would you give young women interested in a career in STEM?
Don't stop your learning at school, take it to the field. Never shy to ask for help. Be a leader, build a team to build things that solve your problem, your neighbours problem, your society problem and continuously iterate. Failure gives a better learning lesson and so never be afraid to fail. Learning Science, and Math with real life experiences will make you love the subject.