Name: Boitumelo Lekhoe
Role/Occupation: Biomedical Engineer
Country: South Africa
Boitumelo Lekhoe has had a rather unconventional STEM journey. She knew she wanted to be an engineer from a very young age and so worked very hard in high school to get into her desired engineering course at the appropriate university. Whilst in the first year of her undergraduate degree, she sadly realised that course did not meet her requirements, bust instead of being disheartened she took the brave step of packing her bags and moving to Turkey to study biomedical engineering. She went on to graduate with honours. Lekhoe then pursued her master’ degree in the UK where she graduated with Commendation. She dreamt of working for the UK National Health Services (NHS), but despite been invited for interviews from hospitals and been told that she was a very good candidate, she surprisingly never got the jobs. However, Lekhoe is not one to give up and returned to South Africa, where she received a job offer within a week of her return.
She now works as a medical field service engineer specializing in medical imaging and is responsible for the maintenance of high-end imaging technology, an opportunity she feels she would have never had in a hospital setting. The thought of knowing that the problems she solves will enable a medical practitioner to better diagnose patients and save lives gives her immense satisfaction, “I know that any work I do on the machinery has a palpable impact on my community.”
As a young woman of colour in STEM, Lekhoe has sometimes had to face discrimination, from being overlooked for learning and developmental opportunities due to her gender to sometimes being mistaken for a patient at hospitals despite wearing her work gear and carrying her toolbox. But she does not let these instances get the better of her, she feels that “such encounters reaffirm the fact that I am called for such a time as this, trailblazing the path for others like me and redefining the faces of medical engineering.” Her advice to young women aspiring to enter the STEM field is to let go of fear and just start, “understand that some people harbour unconscious bias but do not let it corrode the path you have set out for yourself. Stop doubting yourself and just start. Apply to those programmes, apply to those jobs. You must start somewhere.”
She has a positive outlook for Africa and the growth of STEM on the continent, she feels that although, “we may currently lack the resources to advance or accelerate our abilities to pursue our aspirations… Africa is growing and so are its people, and I do believe that in future, we will make it a land of possibility.”
Read more about this driven young Geeky Girl, who sometimes playfully refers to herself as a fancy mechanic, but is in fact a trailblazer, engineering the pathway in STEM, not only for herself but for the many women who will come after her.
Boitumelo Lekhoe was interviewed by Dhruti Dheda, the founder of the African Steminist on behalf of Geeky Girl Reality. The full interview can be found here.
Comentarios