Early Life and Education
MacGill was born in Vancouver on 27 March 1905, daughter of James Henry MacGill, a prominent Vancouver lawyer, and Helen Gregory MacGill, British Columbia's first woman judge. Her mother was an advocate of women's suffrage and influenced her decision to study engineering. MacGill graduated from the University of Toronto in 1927, was the first Canadian woman to earn a degree in aeronautical engineering.
Following graduation, she took a junior job with a firm in Pontiac, Michigan. While there, she began part-time graduate studies in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan, enrolling in the fall of 1927 in the full-time Master of Science in Engineering program to begin aircraft design work and conduct research and development in the University's new aeronautics facilities. In 1929, she became the first woman in North America, likely the world, to be awarded a masters degree in aeronautical engineering.
Contracting polio just before her graduation, MacGill was told that she would probably spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. She refused to accept that possibility, however, and learned to walk supported by two strong metal canes. She wrote magazine articles about aircraft and flying to help finance her doctoral studies at MIT in Cambridge.
Read more about this topic: Elsie MacGill
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.”
—Joyce Cary (1888–1957)
“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)