Her Story
About Tia
I've spent my career in optics manufacturing and quality management systems. I started as a crystal growth engineer at VLOC, a subsidiary of 2-6 Incorporated (now Coherent), where I worked for 17 years, progressing from working with smaller crystals to bigger crystals in more expensive labs, eventually becoming supervisor and then manager of the team. After about 10 years as quality manager there, when the plant was going to close and relocate to California, I chose not to move and instead started my own business for 3 years running a Young Rembrandts franchise doing after-school programming with kids. I also worked at Catalan Pharma Solutions as a continuous improvement leader for about 3 years, which gave me the flexibility I needed as a single parent to take my son to soccer practice and his activities. Then former colleagues who had started their own company recruited me to build their quality management system from the ground up. What was enticing was the opportunity to put my own footprint down and build the system the way I wanted it, without the flaws I'd seen in other people's systems. I've been with them since 2019, about 6 years now, and we've recently expanded globally through acquisitions. Now I lead the quality management system across our entire organization in Malaysia, UK, Florida, and Colorado. I'm currently based in Colorado for 15 months setting up operations there. I centralize everything around QT9 Management Software, which I love, and it gives us visibility across all locations globally.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Tia
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I make sure I mentor young ladies interested in engineering specifically, or any science, anybody really, but it's close to my heart when I see a young lady that's trying to do engineering, because it's not easy, it's mostly male. Chemical engineering had a lot of females at Florida State at the time, that's where all the girls settled in chemical engineering, but it's not easy, it's a male-dominated industry. I really didn't have good mentors, and that's one thing I haven't really had. I learned the hard way that people climbing up the ladders, it's not just because of what they know, it was more of who they know. So mentoring is a big deal. For the young lady I'm mentoring at St. Pete College who wants to be an architectural engineer and play basketball, I told her to not just look for schools with architectural engineering, look for civil engineering. That'll broaden the net for you. Every school in Florida has a civil engineering department, and that's basically the foundation to architectural engineering. But make sure that the basketball coach is gonna allow you the time to go off and do basketball and study engineering. A lot of times, engineering courses are tough, the schedule is different, and basketball is gonna have you traveling, so my advice to her was to make sure she's honest with herself and the coaches and ask if they really will allow her to do engineering as a degree and play basketball. I'm also challenging her to challenge her counselors to make sure she's taking the right courses, like Calc 1, Calc 2, Calc 3 that engineers take, not business calculus, so when she wants to be an engineer, she's not surprised and doesn't have what she needs.
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