SOLIDWORKS Women in Engineering Series – Lynsey Bernier

Lynsey Bernier began working with her dad at a young age; she was always curious how things worked. Her parents both always inspired her to work hard and always push to achieve more. She liked math, and science, and began college knowing that she wanted to be an engineering student. In her first CAD class during her freshman year at UMass Dartmouth, she was exposed to SOLIDWORKS, and really liked Mechanical Engineering. She declared Mechanical Engineering as her major beginning sophomore year, and hasn’t looked back since!

Once she began using CAD, she used tutorials to learn a lot of new skills and by her senior year it became imperative to have a really good grasp on designing. Through her college career, she was involved in many different groups that helped her be more involved in the Engineering community, and gave her the opportunity to share her passion with others, particularly younger female students that were just entering the engineering world themselves.

Lynsey was the treasurer for the SWE chapter at her university, and helped recruit new members, realizing that engineering could potentially be an intimidating field for girls to join, and anyone, for that matter. She impressed upon the new members of the club that majoring in engineering was an attainable goal, and that you can “still have fun and be creative, while working with math and science!” After graduating, she is still active in SWE, and goes to local schools to help younger students learn about Engineering at an early age.

Lynsey’s enthusiasm for her job is proves that she is truly in the right field. She is now a Project Engineer at Hasbro. Here she works with the Marketing and Design teams to develop new toys. She is part of Hasbro’s “Transformers” team, and works to debug toys, set up costing and scheduling, and manages communication with eastern partners for product development. Some days, may even be spent working with focus groups of kids to find out what their thoughts are on new toys!

Throughout her education, Lynsey said that she had felt, at times, that it was difficult to be a woman in the field of engineering. Moving into her career, she was pleasantly surprised by the number of females in every department that she has worked with at Hasbro. Being part of a company that has such a diverse group of people has provided a comfortable and opportunistic place to work.

 

Now, as a role model herself for younger engineers, she would like to inspire them to think of engineering as not only being “nerdy” but fun! There are some very technical jobs out there, but also jobs where you can create and innovate, and that is exactly what Lynsey is doing!

Favorite Hasbro Character: “At first it was Iron Man for being an engineered superhero, but since working on Transformers, Chromia has become my favorite ladybot.”