she walked in for a receptionist job. they sent for the engineers.
Angelia Mendez Silva - Program Manager, MEP Engineering
Angelia Mendez Silva didn’t set out to be an engineer. She set out to prove something.
When her aunt, a civil engineer herself, suggested she try electrical engineering, she mentioned her own sister had done exactly that. A woman. An electrical engineer. In a field that had long made clear it was not designed with women in mind. Angelia heard that and felt something shift inside her. “This is a woman,” she thought. “She is an engineer in a man-led field. I can do that too.”
She took it as a challenge. And then she spent the next ten years making good on it.
Those ten years were not clean or linear. She was raising a daughter, working as a server, studying when she could, and trying to hold all of it together.
When her daughter was three and approaching school age, Angelia made the hardest decision of her life: she left Puerto Rico. The island she had grown up on, the place she had always said she would never leave. She packed up her life and moved to Florida because her daughter deserved every opportunity she could give her.
“I used to say I would never ever leave,” she says quietly. “But that was my biggest sacrifice.”
She finished her degree at the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico’s Orlando satellite campus. Before she graduated, needing a way into the industry and knowing she had no experience to offer, she did something bold and quietly brilliant: she applied for a receptionist position at an engineering firm. Her thinking was simple. Get in the door. Let people get to know her. Let the rest follow.
She joined her current team on March 16, 2020 — a Monday that turned out to be one of the most disorienting weeks in recent memory. By the end of her first day, everyone had been sent home. The world had shut down. She was learning a new company remotely while simultaneously managing her daughter’s homeschooling, holding two full-time responsibilities under the same roof, neither one willing to pause for the other.
Her mentor was a phone call away. Every question was met with patience. Every doubt was met with the same steady response: there is no stupid question, ever. “I still call her,” Angelia says, “even after around ten years of experience. I’ll say, okay, I know in my mind this is how you do it, but am I thinking correctly or am I overthinking this?”
That willingness to keep asking, to stay humble even from a position of hard-won experience, is not a weakness. It is exactly how she got here. She moved from electrical designer to studio lead to production manager, overseeing what she describes as a library of programs, managing deadlines, quality control, and the daily human complexity of leading a team.
She never imagined she would be here. Her face is on posters throughout her university campus and on the sides of buses, part of a marketing campaign that sought her out specifically because of what she represented: a Hispanic woman, a mother, an engineering student. She was proof that the path existed. She still is.
“No matter how intimidating it seems, it can be done. As long as you keep on it and don’t let yourself down, you can do anything you want to do.” She pauses, then says the thing that might be truest of all. “What’s meant to find you is gonna find you.”
