Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 1 Spring 2018 | Page 24

Growing up in
communist Romania
under the rule of
Nicolae Ceausescu,
Corina Sandu was
an only child who
excelled in math,
earning her place
into the best high
school and univer-
sity in Bucharest.
But math for its own
sake didn’t ap-
peal to her, so she
turned to the one
thing that helped
make math useful
to her – mechanical
engineering.
“I could see a mech-
I chose precision mechanics and had to
anism, I could visu-
take the exam for that specialization,"
alize a system and try
Sandu explained. Students were selected
Corina Sandu
to understand how it
to programs based on their score.
Romania
works – I could model
The Romanian college system at the
these things and
time featured cohorts who would all
design them. I was
attend a series of classes together and
much more attracted
have labs in smaller groups.
to things I could have
my hands on than say, going into other areas of
“We really didn’t have homework, except
engineering,” Sandu said.
for projects in the later years. Everything was
pretty much the end-of-year exam. One day,
With a lawyer/journalist father and a com-
one exam, one grade. If you passed,” Sandu said,
puter programmer mother, Sandu would go
“you would carry on to the next year, but if you
to work with her mother and learn how to use
failed a subject in the first year, you had to take
punch cards, and how to look at listings in the
the entrance exam again. And if you failed in
program code. She saw the enormous comput-
a subsequent year, you would have to do the
ers of the 1970s, and started to pick up on how
whole year’s course of study over again with the
things were done, so that by the time she took a
next cohort.”
test for high school placement, she was among
the best in her class in most subjects, helping
Of the 250 students in Sandu’s cohort, all but
pave her way to university.
30 were female. And gender didn’t figure into
job
SPRING
2018
PAGE placement.
24
MOMENTUM
“I went to the polytechnique
institute
where