Hello and welcome back to Redirected. My name is Andrew East and this is show where we sit down with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, really anybody who has experienced a pivot or change in life.

We all go through them and I wanted to sit down with people who have made it through these changes well in order to glean some wisdom but also hear some pretty dang good stories.

Today we are continuing our Forbes 30 under 30 series where we sit down and talk with people who are redirecting the future and our guest today is the one and only Julia Herried.

So Julia is a co-founder of an organization called Maker Girl and after graduating from the University of Illinois she created this nonprofit that helps bridge the STEM gender gap starting with girls age seven to 10 years old.

She's reached nearly 4,000 girls across 22 different states and what she does is she'll bring them in and they will design and print items such as key chains, bolts and rings on 3D printer.

So this is amazing you can imagine all the things that you need to learn in order to 3D print an object and I love what she's doing.

If you want to find out more about Maker Girl and what Julia is up to I will link that information down below but hats off to Julia for coming up with such a creative solution to the STEM gender gap that we see.

Anyway, if you haven't subscribed to the show and given an rating please do so on whatever platform you're listening on and without further ado I bring you Julia Herried.

Julia it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

A couple of things first of all I understand you just recently got engaged is that right.

Yes I did you are on the wall I did get engaged.

Wow I have not told anyone on a podcast before about my engagement so I've been dating him for about a year and I happen to find the ring in a shoe the day of the last week because he said he needs a big walking shoes.

So I happen to look in the shoe and I moved the sock and there was a box so I have an idea that it was going to happen that day I did not listen to the box but you know what the shapes of the boxes are and he asked that to me in the afternoon and we went back to a restaurant in little Italy where I was living up until very recently in Chicago.

I named to Fano and he asked outside of the restaurant because that's where we had our first date.

Julia I would love to hear I always like to start off hearing people's up rings hearing how they got to where they are today and what their foundation was.

How did you get to where you are today?

Definitely so I grew up in a western suburb of Chicago and both my parents part of my education and my dad is a nuclear engineer so I had a deep amount of engineering and the love to fix and make things from him all the time.

He would always say come work on the car with me like we're going to fix an engine that was I didn't know how to do. And then so I had that side from my dad and then on my mom's side she's in actually education and she teaches as a job and she kind of had me do a lot more languages and art.

So I have oil painting background and I took Spanish French and Latin for a large part of my life. So I definitely had both parts kind of of the brain activated as a young kid.

So I would say my love of learning came from my parents and still does and then that brought me to college at the University of Illinois and Champaign or Banna where I studied accounting and then while I was there I took a social entrepreneurship class and we thought about what bothered us.

And for me it was a lack of women and diversity in leadership positions so CSOs have very few women and them positions.

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