Sandia scientist shares how she overcame self-doubt to pursue her dream job.

Meg McCarthy credits a quarter-life crisis for lighting the fire she needed to make the career change that would lead her to Sandia.

“I wasn’t a great student,” Meg said. “If it hadn’t been for music, I probably would have dropped out.”

Meg didn’t drop out, and her musical talents helped her get into college, but within a few years, she realized she didn’t want to be a professional musician.

After college, Meg moved to Europe, where she taught English for six years. “It was a cool career; the traveling was great, but teaching wasn’t for me,” she said.

In her mid-twenties, Meg was looking to start over.

Starting over

“As I thought about what to do next, I kept wishing I had done better in school,” she said. “As a kid, I loved reading science fiction, building computers and playing video games. In college, I worked as a stagehand and was fascinated by the science and technical aspects of how audio and lights worked on stage.”

Even when it came to music, Meg thought of performance like a scientist.

“You have all of these components that have to come together at a specific time and place to make music,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s just noise.”

Meg loved science and was fascinated by those who worked in scientific fields, but over the years, she convinced herself, incorrectly, that she wasn’t smart enough to be a scientist. However, as Meg contemplated her future, she kept circling back to all the what-ifs and decided there was no harm in giving science a shot.

“What was the worst that could happen?” she asked. “I started slow, retaking eighth- and ninth-grade math classes and collecting some credits online for things I had missed in high school.”

A different approach

Meg was in Germany at the time and was not having luck finding affordable American textbooks to help her on her journey, so she turned to what she could find in the German libraries.

“Their approach to math and science was different from what I learned in school,” she said. “It seemed more top down and big picture; instead of asking what happens if you add a negative number, they ask, why do we have negatives numbers at all? This was an approach to learning I understood; it clicked. I had been so hard on myself for how poorly I did in school, but I guess I just needed a different environment, a different approach.”

Meg took online courses to replace the physics, chemistry and calculus classes she missed in high school. Each course took a few months, but the more she learned, the more her confidence grew, as did her momentum.

Becoming a scientist

She enrolled at the Hamburg University of Technology and pursued a degree in General Engineering Science. Near the end of the program, Meg and her husband decided to move back to the U.S., where she planned to pursue her master’s.

“My parents live in Southern California, so I applied to a few schools in that area,” she said. “University of California, Irvine, saw my application, and the director reached out to see if I wanted to try a Ph.D. My first thought was, ‘What would I do with a Ph.D.?’”

It turns out a doctorate would help Meg get “the jobs I had dreamed about.”

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I really wanted a career in research,” she said. “Having a job where you could research things like moon bases, space elevators, how to make products more environmentally friendly, designing things that could be reused instead of creating more waste — these were the coolest jobs ever, in my opinion.”

Meg earned her doctorate from UC Irvine in materials science and engineering, where she specialized in metals. And sure enough, that degree helped her get her dream job at Sandia.

“I just call myself a scientist,” she said. “But technically, I’m a computational materials scientist and a researcher in metallurgy. I get to figure out how things, specifically metals, react and behave atom by atom, piece by piece.”

“We’ll heat things up, poke them, squish them and do all kinds of simulations to see how the tiniest changes in material can affect behavior on a much larger scale,” she said. “It’s a lot like music — the specifics of how a single chord is played, the tone of a flute, the beat of a drum — how individually they collectively change the entire sound and mood of a song.”

Piece by piece sounds a lot like how Meg approached her career journey.

“Because of how I did in high school, I assumed I was not smart enough to pursue science and closed myself off,” she said. “But once I got older, I had this nagging sense that I could have done better, and so I tried. I opened myself up, took some risks, and decided I was okay with being embarrassed. In the process, I discovered that bit by bit, I could become a scientist. And so, I did.”