A day in the life: Rana El Chemaitelly, the woman behind The Little Engineer

While working part time at the American University of Beirut (AUB), mechanical engineer Rana El Chemaitelly noticed that many of her students didn’t have practical skills. To combat this, she set up The Little Engineer (TLE), an after-school club that gives children exposure to the field of engineering. Wanting to focus on the skill sets required for an increasingly automated and sustainable world, she has focused her courses for the children on the fields of robotics, renewable energy, and the environment.

Going forward TLE has already struck partnerships with Airbus and the UAE Space Agency in Abu Dhabi, in order to start providing courses in aviation and space exploration.

For El Chemaitelly, equipping the children with the right tools, guidance, and a safe space in which to experiment, she is preparing a new generation of engineers who really know what they want to do and how to do it. Witnessing many students dropping out at university level engineering, not having the right language to tackle the subjects, has been a driving force behind her work through TLE.

“I want to see successful and determined engineers,” she says. And starting from an early age the talent needed in these sectors can be honed. So, with an understanding of the world of engineering starting at an early age there’s a chance for a MENA-born Elon Musk to emerge, a now-prominent CEO and global game changer that once said, “I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.”

Original article by Lucy Knight

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A day in the life: Rana El Chemaitelly, the woman behind The Little Engineer