Lilia Sanchez

Lilia Sanchez is an Electrical and Computer Engineering student at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Sanchez was born in El Paso, Texas and raised in Zacatecas, Mexico, where she lived for 20 years. School in Zacatecas, she says, is much different than it is in the United States. For one, she started learning pre-calculus in middle school. “We teach math really well,” she says. Another difference, and one that took the most getting used to once she started at UTEP, was independent learning. According to Sanchez, the teacher-student relationship is much more involved in Mexico than in America. “If more than 20 per cent of the class is not doing well and they need more hours from the professor and they request it, they can go set hours through the weekends or after school hours. It’s a very close relationship.”

The move to El Paso in 2011, when Sanchez was 19, was a tough adjustment for her—she spoke limited English and was working part-time at a department store while taking ESL classes. Eventually, her language skills improved, thanks in part to the practice her customer service job at a jewelry store offered her, and she enrolled at UTEP as an ECE major based on her skills in mathematics. As a new English speaker, she says, learning science in her non-native language made classes especially challenging for her.

In the future, Sanchez says she’d like to “improve devices that are already on the market or implement a new device either in the energy field or the biomedical field.” To her, these are the areas most in need of development, with specific attention paid to solar cells and STD testing equipment.

This summer, Sanchez is working on a research project titled “Highly Permeable Graphene Oxide Membranes for Water Desalination and Purification” in Professor Chuanhua Duan’s laboratory. The project aims to use nanometer-thin strips of Graphene Oxide to filter out ions from water. When not working, she is enjoying her time in Boston; “It’s a very entrepreneurial city and a cultural city at the same time,” she says. She’s kept busy during her downtime, attending research conferences, visiting tech companies, participating in entrepreneurship workshops and even taking a Python programming class.

Sanchez’s path toward engineering has had more hurdles than most. Her advice to young people who may also be facing difficulty? “Don’t find opportunities, make opportunities. I have gotten a lot of ‘No’s’ and that never stopped me and that’s why I am here,” she says. “At the end of the day, everyone is their best boss.”