STEPS4GROWTH- From her high school days touring colleges with her sister to her current work as a Ph.D. student at North Carolina A&T, Kourtney Tucker has always followed a path deeply rooted in engineering. Growing up with her father, an engineer himself, meant early exposure to the field. “I’ve always been a daddy’s girl,” Tucker said. “He didn’t have any sons, so a lot of his interests, he taught us when we were younger. That’s kind of how my interest in engineering started.”
With a sister who studied manufacturing engineering and cousins who also chose engineering careers, the field became a family tradition. Tucker continued the legacy at Virginia State University, where her senior project introduced her to autonomous vehicles. “I started dabbling with different versions of autonomous vehicles, and I just wanted to learn a little bit more about it,” she explained. Encouraged by a former professor who had earned his Ph.D. at North Carolina A&T, Tucker decided to pursue her doctorate in the Department of Computational Data Science and Engineering, where she now works as a graduate research assistant under Dr. Balakrishna Gokaraju.
Her current research centers on indoor navigation and lane-keeping technologies, where she is experimenting with deep learning techniques and sensor applications. “We originally were working with a camera, and now I’m trying to see if I could possibly use a specific type of LIDAR,” Tucker shared.
The transition from undergraduate to graduate school has been both exciting and challenging. “It’s very much a mixture,” she said. “I’ve noticed the difference between undergrad and grad school. There are gaps in areas where I’m learning, so I’ve been taking time to catch myself up. But I have great advisors, great lab help, and lab managers who answer any questions I may have. Even then, it requires a lot of my own research, but it’s getting easier as I continue to go on.”
Through it all, the lessons from her father remain close. “I never saw myself as not being capable, because a lot of the roles you’d normally see males doing, I did growing up. I don’t see any role as gender-specific. And I also carry the confidence of my faith, knowing that if God put me here, I’m going to get it done.”
Looking ahead, Tucker’s plans include both industry and academia. “At the end of my Ph.D., I would like to work in the industry for a little while, just to gain more knowledge. Eventually, when I get older, I would like to go back to academia, possibly teach at my undergrad because of how much my professors have instilled in me. And my big dream, since I was a little girl, is to start my own nonprofit for young girls to get into STEM, because not many girls have a father like mine to guide them into it. I want to be able to do that for others.”
