July 28, 2003

The Atypical Terri Helmlinger

 — New NSPE President Fits into a Man’s World Like a Lady

- by Jane Albright, Industrial Extension Service, NC State University

Teresa Helmlinger

The Barbie doll, dressed in a black sparkly formal and still in its box, sits on a shelf in her office on the Centennial Campus at North Carolina State University. That’s just one clue that this isn’t the typical office of the average engineer. Teresa Helmlinger, usually known as Terri, flatly refuses to be average.

The first woman president of the National Society for Professional Engineers (NSPE) took time to talk about her career a couple of weeks before she took office on July 12 in San Antonio. As usual, she was impeccably dressed in a suit more fashionable and colorful than the simply tailored dark suits favored by most of the women administrators at NC State. While the scarf matches and the lipstick is applied regularly, at any moment she may kick off her pumps and walk down the hallway in her stocking feet.

The Barbie was a birthday gift given two years ago, after Helmlinger had told a friend about a dream: She was being inaugurated as president of NSPE and wearing her first Barbie’s ball gown. The friend meant it to be funny. Helmlinger accepted the doll and the dream as the impetus to go for it.

Barbie the icon has been an astronaut and a physician, and for that reason, Helmlinger thinks she isn’t a bad role model. “My mother always told me ‘I want you to be lady first’,” Helmlinger recalled. “And with everything Barbie has gone through, she has been a lady first. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

Helmlinger embraces being a woman. “All I can be is who I am,” she said. “I appreciate the fact that people don’t always accept me – I’m not in their paradigm. But I forget about what they think and make them think differently.”

Thinking differently didn’t come easily at NC State’s Industrial Extension Service (IES) when Helmlinger took over as executive director in 1999. She was the first woman leader there, too, and the group of mostly male academics and engineers took a while getting used to their new boss. She brought strategic planning and MBA-speak to an academic setting with a corporate business savvy honed by almost 20 years with Progress Energy. After three years of reorganization and growth, mutual respect has replaced most doubts at IES.

Last year, her job title was expanded to assistant vice chancellor for extension and engagement in recognition of the importance of IES to the university’s mission to serve the state, and in recognition of her leadership.

“There are still people who are confused by me,” Helmlinger said. “My manner of being forthright confuses people. People are startled by how genuine I am. They think I’m more plastic than I really am.”

Helmlinger reached the NSPE presidency through years of paying her dues filling various offices regionally and within Professional Engineers of North Carolina (PENC). “I got there because I contributed and not because I was a woman,” she said. PENC recognized her years of service by naming her a Fellow at their annual meeting in June.

Yet the year is 2003 and the fact remains that the 69-year-old NSPE is just now having its first woman president. “Yes, that’s a long time,” Helmlinger agreed. “But it’s the same as the presidency of the United States. There haven’t been many women in the pipeline. They have to get ahead on their own merit, and they have to make enough of a contribution to break the glass ceiling.”

Helmlinger places herself in the second wave of women to enter engineering in the 1970s; the first wave occurred during World War II. She believes it’s time for another resurgence. “We really need to do more to attract women and minorities,” she said. Enrollments of women in engineering colleges has leveled off or declined in the past two decades.

She believes many capable women don’t consider engineering. She didn’t, herself, until NASA visited NC State University the summer of her junior year. The math education major had just completed her student teaching and learned that she didn’t want to be a teacher. NASA was urging college women to try the sciences and engineering. Helmlinger found her niche in operations research, a “turbo-charged form of industrial engineering.” She enjoyed cutting waste out of processes and creating efficiencies. An engineer was born.

Most of her college engineering classes were overwhelmingly male. She doesn’t remember any classes with more than herself and another woman with all the guys. The one ladies restroom in the building was sufficient. Helmlinger remembers being accepted as an equal within the male culture at NC State, however. “My advisor was a woman engineer, Billie Richardson,” she said. “Having her there made it OK.”

She admits to a brief time of trying to look like a man to fit into a man’s world. “That’s what college is about, experimenting,” she said, rolling her eyes at the memory of her 20-year-old self without make-up. She decided the world will have to accept her as the feminine female she naturally is.

And in her role as NSPE president, she wants other young women to see that engineering and womanliness can mix successfully. Elizabeth Byrd started working with Helmlinger right after college. “I learned more about how to be a ‘real’ engineer from her than from anyone,” Byrd says in a script to be given at the NSPE inauguration. “How many engineers could teach you how to properly wear high heels?”

Helmlinger wants to replace the stereotype of engineer from “nerdy” to leader. An NSPE-funded study found that engineers have an image of high integrity, but few people understand what engineers do. In her role as president, she hopes to show that engineering can be fun and she plans to have fun doing it. “I’m different, and I can tell about myself,” she said.

Recently the boxed Barbie has been joined on the shelf by her new best friend, the Teresa doll, a gift for Helmlinger’s 50th birthday in May. “There really is a Teresa doll?” she had asked when presented with the gift. There is, but the box of this one had been altered to suit the receiver. Across the front of the box it clearly reads, “The Official Doll of the NSPE.”

— albright —

Jane Albright is public affairs officer for the Industrial Extension Service at North Carolina State University ©2003

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