 The concepts of perseverance and grit are something that you have to practice every single day. You have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, how bad do I want this? My name is Mary Neidrauer and I'm a fifth-year PhD student in organic chemistry. I grew up as one of nine children on a goat dairy in rural East Texas. My family didn't really believe in formal education or education of any kind and so I grew up working as a full-time farmhand and caring for younger siblings and never had any sort of formal schooling. This life led to a rather difficult childhood. We weren't really interacting with anyone outside of the immediate family and so sort of typical childhood things didn't really happen in my family. My family didn't have a television so any leisure time that we did have was spent reading. Every other week or so we would go into town and go to a library and we'd be able to check out as many books as we wanted. My entire childhood was kind of spent self-teaching myself everything that I wanted to learn. Somewhere around age nine or 10 I checked out of autobiography for Mary Curie. She's the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and she was a physicist as well as a chemist. In the environment I was raised in it wasn't very common for women to become scientists or really have a career of any kind and reading that biography of Mary Curie where she flourished in a way that no one ever had and that sort of inspired me to try to rise above that role that women in my environment were often forced into. By the time I hit early teens I had pretty much realized that if I actually wanted to get a PhD in chemistry I would need to make some changes. When I was 15 I left home and I enrolled in the local junior college to study chemistry. When I turned 17 I enlisted in the Army National Guard. Part of that was for the excitement and experience and part of it was also to help pay for tuition. I took 12 months and I went on a combat deployment to Iraq and Kuwait. Being in the Army was a very interesting experience it was one of the first times I had ever really been around people outside of my immediate family. It definitely provided a unique opportunity to learn how to work with people how to be a leader. My senior year of college I started applying to graduate schools but something that I always struggled with especially at that time was self-doubt and I was absolutely certain that I was not going to get accepted to any graduate programs. I think all of us struggle at various points to feel like we deserve to be here but it's something that you just have to push through and let your accomplishments speak for themselves. Pernie was actually the first acceptance letter that I got and I'll never forget that day. It was the first time that I had ever realized that maybe I actually belong here and I'm not just faking it. Yeah so this part is starting to grind down with the plastic. It looks like all of it's building up. Yeah so it's like leaves a plastic dust so we switch it to metal. As part of one of my research projects I collaborated with the Amy Instrumentation Facility at Purdue and we designed a new instrument a photochemical reactor for doing chemical reactions with light. You can take molecules that you synthesize on resin which is just a polymer and use light to cleave it off of that polymer. It's not really a technology that exists right now for that type of chemistry and we've applied for a patent currently and we're awaiting that acceptance from the US Patent Office. I happened upon a program that Purdue University Global offers which is an online MBA that is self-paced so I enrolled in it and I earned my MBA currently with my PhD. I've had a decent amount of experience in science and the military and sports but the business world is not something I've ever had any experience in and I don't like having a big blank spot like that where I'm completely clueless about a huge arena of life and so when I happened upon the program it seemed like a no-brainer I had to do it just to kind of learn about that faction of society. There's so much in the world to learn and experience that it's not possible to do all of it but I'm sure gonna try. Many of the areas that I've experienced in life tend to be male-dominated fields. I hope that by proving that women can do all of those things that inspires young girls like myself in the future who have been told that women are inferior that that's not actually true and they can do whatever they want to do. When I defended my PhD it was 10 years to the day from the first day that I walked into a classroom for the first time in my life. I've sort of proven to child me that all my dreams were possible and I think now I can finally move on and not always feel like I'm coming from behind. Learning and education has really changed my life and that's not just in the sense of getting a degree or getting a job but it gives me a purpose. Really our purpose in life is to just learn about the world around us and it's all inspiring to walk through a library and see the sheer amount of knowledge and to just know that it's all there for you to learn.