Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 1 Spring 2018 | Page 26

but I never felt homesick. Maybe because
Adrian and I were together, or maybe because
the people in Iowa were so welcoming and
friendly. It was good and we felt safe in Iowa
and once we got there, that was our life.”
Studying in a graduate program in Iowa
was different for
Sandu for reasons
beyond the new
location. Where
her undergraduate
experience featured a
female to male ratio
of more than 7:1, she
was now one of two
women alongside a
dozen men.
“I didn’t question
it because it didn’t
cross my mind,”
Sandu said. “You
know, some people
go to school here and
others there, it didn’t
feel any different.”
As a first-year
graduate student
Sandu worked on de-
veloping software for
an advanced training
simulator. “My
portion of the project
was to model the powertrain for manual and
automatic transmissions – the clutch, gearbox,
torque converter – pretty much everything
Scanned by CamScanner
that leads to the pedals,” she said.
By the time she defended her master’s thesis
in 1995 Sandu was pregnant with her first
daughter, and she began her doctoral studies
in the fall. “My daughter was due in January
1996, and I remember we were wondering
MOMENTUM
SPRING 2018
what to do because I couldn’t work full time
that semester, but I also couldn’t interrupt my
courses because I would lose my F1 visa status.
It was a very challenging situation to be in.”
Sandu received a graduate fellowship and
was allowed some flexibility that semester
through independent study. “My advisor also
was very understanding and I’m very appre-
ciative of him for that. After that, it was all
about being flexible.”
In the summer of 1997 Sandu’s husband
received a post-doctoral fellowship in New
York. While he moved east, she stayed in
Iowa, and he traveled across the country once
a month to spend time with his new family.
“After a semester I told my advisor I intend-
ed to continue working on my dissertation
from New York. In December 1997 my
daughter and I moved east and next year my
husband got an offer from Michigan Tech.
But he had to wait for a new fiscal year to get
an H1 visa, so he drove me and our daughter
back to Iowa before heading back to Romania
to wait on the new visa. When he got it he
came back to go to work in Michigan and in
December 1998, we all moved there.”
The Sandus stayed in Michigan until moving
to Virginia Tech in 2003.
Throughout all of the moves and challenges,
Sandu said she believes she has found the
piece of advice most beneficial to young
women entering the engineering profession.
"We live our personal lives and our profes-
sional lives simultaneously, and both can be
fulfilling by making conscientious decisions to
maintain a good balance between them," San-
du said. "Women must trust that they bring
a unique set of skills and perspectives that are
vital to the profession and that they will make
a difference in our society."
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