
In 2022, Ruha Tacey was facing a dilemma: After years as a process engineer in the energy and materials industries, she had stepped back to raise her family and was now looking for ways to re-enter industry. Despite her experience and passion for engineering, her time away had shaken her confidence and made her feel like she didn鈥檛 belong in the workforce. To ease back into chemical engineering, she turned toward social media content creation and set the ambitious goal of posting five videos every week. 鈥淚 wanted something where I could use my brain and creativity and could help me feel connected with chemical engineering,鈥 she says. Today, her has more than 90,000 followers, and her videos cover themes such as why math matters, what engineers do, and engineering internship alternatives. To help guide budding engineers, Tacey also launched Future ChemE, a network that offers study tools, mentoring services, and online courses.
Tacey鈥檚 career
Tacey鈥檚 work as an engineering advocate emphasizes the importance of creating a space for everyone in chemical engineering, partly inspired by her own experience. Although she had found success in college and her career, graduating from Auburn Univ. in 2012 and going on to work as a process contact engineer at ExxonMobil, she sometimes felt that she had only gotten to where she was because of luck. This feeling intensified after becoming a full-time parent to three daughters in 2016. Her 鈥渋mposter syndrome鈥 didn鈥檛 go away until she began sharing her insecurities with others. When Tacey first started posting videos about these anxieties, the response was immediate. 鈥淭he beautiful thing about social media is that when I shared that, I attracted people that all said, 鈥極h my gosh, me too! I have that same fear,鈥欌 says Tacey.
Realizing that these feelings were universal was a revelation for Tacey, and having the ability to step back allowed her to realize how absurd this anxiety had always been. 鈥淲hen you鈥檙e in chemical engineering, it鈥檚 all about that next project,鈥 she says, 鈥渂ut I wasn鈥檛 on that train anymore. I had stopped at the station and could admire all the track I had laid.鈥
What life looks like now
Today, as she works full-time as a content creator, mentor, and head of the Future ChemE network, much of her focus is helping engineers through university and the transition into the workforce, with one of her primary goals being to cut down on the number of students dropping out of undergraduate programs. 鈥淪ometimes all you need is the right encouragement at the right moment,鈥 she recounts. 鈥淚f they see a video from me showing how everyone goes through this, they might think, 鈥榠f she鈥檚 fine, then maybe I鈥檒l be fine.鈥欌 To help students excel, she developed her online course, the Freshmen Engineering Edge, to provide students with all of the necessary tips and tricks to land internships and earn high grades, while balancing their mental health and eliminating burnout.
Creating relatable and inspirational content
Her content is geared toward young engineers and helps dispel many of the myths of career building. 鈥淭here are so many lies going around,鈥 she says. 鈥淭he first is that you need to send out a thousand applications, that it鈥檚 a numbers game.鈥 For engineers entering the workforce, it can often be easier to dismiss the hiring process as rigged; however, the majority of success she has witnessed began with a human connection, whether that be reaching out directly to recruiters and working engineers or going to career fairs or attending conferences.
In her experience, soft skills, like the ability to connect with professionals and leave a positive impression, are as crucial as technical skills. One of Tacey鈥檚 favorite mentoring success stories is of a young engineer who, when nearing graduation with a 2.1 GPA, realized he had to be strategic when applying to internships. He would call hiring managers to ensure they received his application and make a personal connection. Fortuitously, one hiring manager had recently left one of the companies, and all prior intern applications had gotten lost in the shuffle. This unique circumstance gave the young engineer the chance to connect with the company鈥檚 engineers, and, after working there as an intern, he is now employed in a full-time engineering role.
Broadening her scope
As Tacey and Future ChemE begin to broaden their scope, Tacey鈥檚 content has become a comedic cultural melting pot for different engineering fields, poking fun at the eccentricities unique to each discipline. Initially, she was nervous about branching out from strictly chemical engineering, but at the request of her followers, she began interviewing other types of engineers to understand what it is like to study and work in those fields. Nowadays, Tacey has become something like an engineering anthropologist; many of her videos include her portraying different types of engineers acting out some stereotypical action or thought, and her comment sections are testaments to her portrayals鈥 veracity. Her first pinned video features Tacey as an aerospace engineer ecstatically ranting about rockets, while her rendition of a chemical engineer lies head down asleep on a textbook before jolting awake, afraid she slept through her test.
Now, Tacey faces a new dilemma: as her reach grows, engineers of all stripes are using her services and learning from her content. Her audience has become so diverse that she now debates changing her network鈥檚 name to simply Future Engineer, but, for now, a mix of inertia and her fondness for chemical engineering has kept the name around. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not just chemical engineers I can serve; I can serve a broader audience.鈥
Learn more about Ruha鈥檚 story during her Instagram takeover of on Wednessday, October 16.
This profile originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of CEP. Members have access online to complete issues, including a vast, searchable archive of back-issues found at .