Enthusiastic former elementary school teacher tabbed with leading WiE's outreach programming
Katie Smith always envisioned working at Purdue University.
Born and raised in West Lafayette, Indiana, less than 10 minutes from campus, Smith was familiar with the influence of the university.
She’d also heard a lot about Purdue from dad Allen Nail, an alum.
In January 2025, Smith was eager to share with dad exciting news: She was going to work at his alma mater.
Just in a bit of a different role than either of them would have thought.
Someone with a “calling” for teaching who’d spent 10 years at a local elementary school after securing a degree in elementary education in 2010 and a master’s in educational administration and supervision wasn’t joining Purdue’s College of Education.
Smith was hired as assistant director for the Women in Engineering (WiE) Program in the College of Engineering. Her charge: develop and lead all K-10 programming.
“In a way, it is in the world of education because of what my job is,” a smiling Smith said of the Purdue dream pivot. “I've always kind of felt trapped in only being able to impact the 22-25 students that were in my classroom every year. I wanted my reach to be able to be broader.
“With this role, I feel like I not only get to impact my undergraduate students that I have — I've got a team of 60-plus during the spring semester — but also all of those students they are then impacting. It's like that spider web effect where the people that you're touching are then touching other people and the reach that we can get that way is really powerful.”
‘Meant to be’
Katie Smith was not going to go into education as a vocation.
Absolutely not.
Not interested in following Allen and Sue Nail’s footsteps as middle school teachers — dad a former math teacher at the Lafayette School Corporation; mom a seventh-grade science teacher within the Tippecanoe School Corporation.
Even though Katie did love math and science.
Even though she had the affable personality, the patience, the work ethic, to be an ideal fit for the profession.
Still, her “rebel high school self” was, like, nope.
Then in Smith’s senior year at Harrison High School in West Lafayette, she slightly relented, trying the Harrison High School Cadet Teaching program designed to give students exploratory teaching experiences and provide them a chance to see if teaching was a career they would be interested in.
“I fell in love within the first week,” Smith said. “There was just this moment when I was in a classroom with kids, and I just knew. It’s almost like what people say when you get married, you just know. That’s how I felt about teaching.
“I was like, ‘This is where I was meant to be.’ ”
She was 18.
The third-grade classroom she “pushed into” that year was literally across the street, at Burnett Creek Elementary School. She was an extra set of hands for whatever the teacher needed, all the while gaining classroom experience. Smith enjoyed it so much she extended the time over two high school class periods, utilizing a study hall to spend more time at the elementary school.
With that certainty of her career path, Smith opted to attend Indiana University to pursue elementary education. By only the second semester of the first year, Smith was back in classrooms getting more hands-on experience.
Connecting with students drew her in, and she was eager to find her own classroom to cultivate and deepen relationships with kids.
Turns out, that was going to be back in her hometown.
At a familiar spot.
After Smith graduated from IU, Burnett Creek’s principal, a family friend, called and asked why Smith hadn’t applied for the first-grade teaching position they had. Smith had been looking at other smaller schools in the area, not wanting to take advantage of the personal connection at Burnett Creek. But the persistence won her over, and only 10 minutes after completing the interview, she was offered the job.
“It was kind of a full circle moment,” Smith said. “That was the school that inspired me to go into education. I left, came back, and that school was looking for me to come and take on a teaching role. It was really cool.”
After four years of teaching first grade, she moved to a second-grade classroom. Briefly, she taught third grade during the pandemic, a year that everyone would rather forget.
Despite the typical challenges that come with teaching, the kids kept her coming back.
“Especially in elementary, because you spend your entire day with these kids and they spend more time with you than they do their own parents, they start to feel like yours. You get that protective, supportive, nurturing relationship,” Smith said.
Smith wasn’t the only one feeling a certain kind of way.
Making new connections
The student was laser focused on the destination, zipping down a second-floor hallway in Purdue’s Dudley Hall.
Not a college student, though the height could fool some.
Second-grader Amalia was intent to take advantage of the opportunity — mom bringing her to work that day in the same building, a couple floors up, over spring break in 2025.
The notes that Amalia had been writing and giving to her mom to drop off for Smith weren’t cutting it. Amalia wanted to see her former teacher in person.
The timing didn’t work, as Smith was out of the office, but bystanders saw the searching and followed up on the visitor.
“Connections like that, you know you made an impact when you have kids that want to come back and see you,” Smith said later.
“The idea of making an impact on the next generation and being that person that somebody will remember (is special). Because I remember all of my elementary school teachers, whether it be good or bad. Having that rewarding moment where you know you've made a difference to the point that kids come back and want to see you and they look for that connection, to me, that's the best.”
Next year, the students coming back to say hello are going to be college graduates.
Part of Smith’s role in leading WiE’s outreach is supervising and working alongside current engineering students who are interns and volunteers. The 10-member Outreach Leadership Team and the other 50-plus volunteers are integral in executing WiE’s outreach directives, both programs that existed prior to Smith’s arrival (mainstays like Introduce Engineering Day and Engineering FYI: For Your Imagination) and new programs she’s developed (like Engage).
“It's kind of a combination of my ideas with our (undergraduate) engineers,” Smith said. “I was very transparent with my team from the start and said, ‘Listen, I'm not an engineer. I'm not going to pretend to be an engineer. My wheelhouse is classroom management — what do kids know and what can they do and kind of tailoring your ideas to be age appropriate.’ I've really tried to embrace that this is my role on the team and let the (Purdue students) take a lot of the creative leadership over planning the activities that they think are really neat.
“It's really exciting to build the new relationships with undergrad students. It's been really cool to hear their ideas and hear the breadth of knowledge that they have in their various disciplines and then coming together to figure out how do we tailor this to meet kids, to meet the format, to meet the age, all of the factors we have to look at when planning lessons.”
As with any new job, Smith came in and did an audit of the programming and where there could be gaps. She felt like the numbers were down for middle school student participation. How could WiE do better? Smith wanted to bounce ideas off experts, so she asked her parents over dinner.
“My mom mentioned the tough part is that when you’re a middle school teacher, you’re teaching multiple classes the same thing. So when we have somebody (from the outside) come in and just teach one of your classes then the rest aren’t doing the same thing,” Smith said.
Another challenge was trying to reach that age group with after-school activities. The numbers were low because many students that age are involved in extracurricular activities or go home directly after school, Smith said.
“It's hard to really get that connection if you don't go to the students instead of the students coming to you,” Smith said.
Enter Engage.
The initiative focuses on students in grades 6-8 with the goal of nurturing a love for engineering by enhancing STEM curriculum. It offers schools and teachers several options: single-class visits in which WiE students bring lesson materials; half-day rotations for large groups of students to interact with activities from several engineering disciplines; and STEM nights that WiE assists in planning and provides a tabled activity and information about engineering.
Engage won’t fully launch until the next academic year — there’s already a school signed up for the fall and spring to do half-day visits — but Smith wanted to make sure to test it before it goes live. She had the perfect location for a “soft launch,” bouncing back to Burnett Creek to present in former colleagues’ classrooms.
“The hope with Engage is (No.) 1, that we can get a greater reach because we’re touching all of the students that are in that classroom and, hopefully, the teacher will then take any of the lessons that we have and teach them to the rest of (the) classes because we try to make sure those lessons are something that can be easily replicated by teachers,” Smith said. “We're really intentional with that. The hope is that then that lesson can be continued by the teacher to be able to reach the rest of (the) students. So even though we maybe can't teach all of them ourselves, we can share our ideas and our knowledge to then be passed to other classrooms.”
Smith will continue to grow the outreach offerings, where there’s a need, and she’s eager to expand her connections in the community, too. In her first handful of months on the job, WiE has offered programming for Lafayette Urban Ministry, Bauer Community Center, Boys & Girls Club and Girl Scouts.
“I lived here, but there are a lot of different community partners that we work with that I've never been a part of, have never really heard about their missions,” Smith said, “so I think just feeling more connected with the community and everything that we have out there in the community has been really cool as well.”
There’s still a learning curve, naturally. But, so far, Smith has been happy with her decision to move on from teaching in the traditional sense.
And WiE is happy to have her, said Beth Holloway, the Leah H. Jamieson Director of Women in Engineering.
“I love her enthusiasm. It really comes through in all that she does, and it sets the tone for positive, inspiring engagement,” Holloway said. “Her background in the broad spectrum of primary and secondary education is really helping to make sure we are connecting the students where they’re at and getting them excited and interested in engineering, engineering projects and engineering thinking. We would not be able to do that kind of outreach without someone like Katie with the background she has.”