How did Kim Porter land her first engineering job — and what did she discover that surprised her?
Kim Porter found her first engineering job by responding to a job ad in the New York Times for a biomechanics engineer. The company held the contract to manufacture and design the shuttle spacesuit, and she joined the project in 1986 — within weeks of the Challenger accident — to work on next-generation spacesuit gloves and biomechanical analysis. The surprise? Despite finding the work itself excellent, she quickly realized she had no passion for aerospace as a market channel, and pivoted to Nike the moment an opportunity appeared.
The timing made her entry particularly striking. The Challenger disaster occurred in January 1986, and Porter joined the spacesuit program almost immediately after — stepping into one of the most technically demanding and emotionally charged moments in aerospace history, fresh out of Iowa State University with a degree in engineering science and mechanics emphasizing biomedical engineering. She brought genuine biomechanical expertise to glove design at a moment when the entire industry was being rebuilt under intense scrutiny.
Yet the experience clarified something essential for her early career: the discipline you study and the industry you work in are two entirely different things, and passion for one does not guarantee passion for the other. Recognizing that gap — and acting on it quickly by moving to Nike — set the tone for a career defined by self-awareness as much as technical skill. You can hear the full conversation on Listenly's Ordinary To Badass page.
"No opinions, all data, no emotion. Here's the data, here are the results, this is my recommendation — and then you don't say anything. Silence is power."
— Kim Porter, Ordinary To Badass
About Kim Porter
Kim Porter earned her degree in engineering science and mechanics with an emphasis in biomedical engineering from Iowa State University in the early 1980s — at a time when biomedical engineering was not yet a recognized standalone field. That interdisciplinary foundation is precisely what made her visible to a spacesuit manufacturer scanning the New York Times classifieds for a biomechanics engineer.
Her nearly 40-year career took her from spacesuit glove design in the wake of the Challenger disaster to product design at Nike, and then into an independent consultancy she ran for the majority of her professional life. Across every role and every employer, she was the only woman in the room — a constant she experienced not as exception but as baseline, in an industry where mechanical engineering has held a 1-in-10 gender ratio for women since the early 1980s, unchanged to this day.
Porter has since founded HatchOne, an online engineering community that includes a dedicated Women in Engineering subgroup, where she teaches the next generation of engineers — particularly women — things no one ever taught her. Having recently stepped back from full-time work, she continues to run both HatchOne and her consultancy, bringing four decades of hard-won experience to the engineers now navigating the environments she helped pioneer.
See also
Kim Porter advises eliminating phrases like "I think" and "I believe" from professional vocabulary entirely, calling them self-undermining. Instead, she recommends leading with data, presenting results directly, and following with a clear recommendation — then staying silent, because silence itself is a form of power.
Kim Porter describes her imposter syndrome as following a downward trajectory like a declining stock market over time. Early in her career she internalized it heavily, but across four decades as the only woman in all-male engineering environments, she developed strategies that progressively reduced its hold on her professional confidence.