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:
“To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candour never waited to be asked for its opinion.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)