#SoCaltech: Rupali Batta
“I went to an all-girls high school, was on an all-girls robotics team, and my mom works in tech, so I credit a lot of my confidence in engineering to those spaces and role models. But I am also very aware that not everyone gets that advantage. Since I benefited so much from having encouraging girls’ spaces, I wanted to help build that kind of space at Caltech too. That’s why I lead the Society of Women Engineers [SWE] at Caltech. SWE hosts an event every year called Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day [IGED], where we bring 50 middle school and high school girls to campus and do a whole day of engineering activities. We have them make liquid nitrogen ice cream, make boba with sodium alginate and calcium salts, build marshmallow-spaghetti towers, and tour labs.
“My favorite part is always the raft-building activity. The girls have to build rafts out of cardboard, balloons, duct tape, bubble wrap, and PVC pipes, and then I test them out by climbing onto them in the Gene Pool. This past year, some of the rafts seemed a little ridiculous at first, tall instead of long, and I fully expected to fall backward into the water. I even wore shorts that day and put my hair in a bun, totally expecting to get soaked, but I didn’t! All the rafts held up.
“IGED means so much to me, because year after year, I get to watch girls run around Caltech, see labs, build things, and get excited about rocketry, biology, civil engineering, or whatever activity happened to capture their imagination that day. It feels very full circle. My interest in engineering stemmed from all those all-girls opportunities that I had, so to be able to give that back to a new generation of girls is so meaningful to me.”
Rupali Batta is a fourth-year undergraduate majoring in computer science and minoring in robotics. She has been a software development intern at Amazon Web Services and at AMD, a quantitative research intern at BlackRock, and a propulsion systems intern at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA. She is the current president of Caltech’s Society of Women Engineers. In the fall, she’ll begin her doctoral program at Oxford University and pursue research in robotics.
#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.