Lessons and Humor in the Universal Experiences of Engineers

In 2022, Ruha Tacey was facing a dilemma: After years as a process engineer in the energy and materials industries, she had stepped back to raise her family and was now looking for ways to re-enter industry. Despite her experience and passion for engineering, her time away had shaken her confidence and made her feel like she didn’t belong in the workforce. To ease back into chemical engineering, she turned toward social media content creation and set the ambitious goal of posting five videos every week. “I wanted something where I could use my brain and creativity and could help me feel connected with chemical engineering,” she says. Today, her Instagram account has more than 90,000 followers, and her videos cover themes such as why math matters, what engineers do, and engineering internship alternatives. To help guide budding engineers, Tacey also launched Future ChemE, a network that offers study tools, mentoring services, and online courses.

Tacey’s career    

Tacey’s work as an engineering advocate emphasizes the importance of creating a space for everyone in chemical engineering, partly inspired by her own experience. Although she had found success in college and her career, graduating from Auburn Univ. in 2012 and going on to work as a process contact engineer at ExxonMobil, she sometimes felt that she had only gotten to where she was because of luck. This feeling intensified after becoming a full-time parent to three daughters in 2016. Her “imposter syndrome” didn’t go away until she began sharing her insecurities with others. When Tacey first started posting videos about these anxieties, the response was immediate. “The beautiful thing about social media is that when I shared that, I attracted people that all said, ‘Oh my gosh, me too! I have that same fear,’” says Tacey.

Realizing that these feelings were universal was a revelation for Tacey, and having the ability to step back allowed her to realize how absurd this anxiety had always been. “When you’re in chemical engineering, it’s all about that next project,” she says, “but I wasn’t on that train anymore. I had stopped at the station and could admire all the track I had laid.” 

What life looks like now

Today, as she works full-time as a content creator, mentor, and head of the Future ChemE network, much of her focus is helping engineers through university and the transition into the workforce, with one of her primary goals being to cut down on the number of students dropping out of undergraduate programs. “Sometimes all you need is the right encouragement at the right moment,” she recounts. “If they see a video from me showing how everyone goes through this, they might think, ‘if she’s fine, then maybe I’ll be fine.’” To help students excel, she developed her online course, the Freshmen Engineering Edge, to provide students with all of the necessary tips and tricks to land internships and earn high grades, while balancing their mental health and eliminating burnout. 

Creating relatable and inspirational content

Her content is geared toward young engineers and helps dispel many of the myths of career building. “There are so many lies going around,” she says. “The first is that you need to send out a thousand applications, that it’s a numbers game.” For engineers entering the workforce, it can often be easier to dismiss the hiring process as rigged; however, the majority of success she has witnessed began with a human connection, whether that be reaching out directly to recruiters and working engineers or going to career fairs or attending conferences. 

In her experience, soft skills, like the ability to connect with professionals and leave a positive impression, are as crucial as technical skills. One of Tacey’s favorite mentoring success stories is of a young engineer who, when nearing graduation with a 2.1 GPA, realized he had to be strategic when applying to internships. He would call hiring managers to ensure they received his application and make a personal connection. Fortuitously, one hiring manager had recently left one of the companies, and all prior intern applications had gotten lost in the shuffle. This unique circumstance gave the young engineer the chance to connect with the company’s engineers, and, after working there as an intern, he is now employed in a full-time engineering role. 

Broadening her scope

As Tacey and Future ChemE begin to broaden their scope, Tacey’s content has become a comedic cultural melting pot for different engineering fields, poking fun at the eccentricities unique to each discipline. Initially, she was nervous about branching out from strictly chemical engineering, but at the request of her followers, she began interviewing other types of engineers to understand what it is like to study and work in those fields. Nowadays, Tacey has become something like an engineering anthropologist; many of her videos include her portraying different types of engineers acting out some stereotypical action or thought, and her comment sections are testaments to her portrayals’ veracity. Her first pinned video features Tacey as an aerospace engineer ecstatically ranting about rockets, while her rendition of a chemical engineer lies head down asleep on a textbook before jolting awake, afraid she slept through her test. 

Now, Tacey faces a new dilemma: as her reach grows, engineers of all stripes are using her services and learning from her content. Her audience has become so diverse that she now debates changing her network’s name to simply Future Engineer, but, for now, a mix of inertia and her fondness for chemical engineering has kept the name around. “It’s not just chemical engineers I can serve; I can serve a broader audience.”

Learn more about Ruha’s story during her Instagram takeover of ChEnected’s account on Wednessday, October 16.

This profile originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of CEP. Members have access online to complete issues, including a vast, searchable archive of back-issues found at aiche.org/cep.