(rhythmic music)
- I get asked a lot if the way that I combine femininity
with engineering is branded or intentional.
I am me, Xyla Foxlin,
and I am building the things
that Xyla Foxlin wants to build.
(rhythmic music continues)
Anyway, let's start.
(people screaming)
I am trying to use my platform on the internet
to share how creative and interesting
and artistic science and engineering can really be.
(rhythmic music continues)
I think my favorite part about being a content creator
is that, unlike in a traditional engineering job,
where I would spend three years designing the fin angle
on one rocket, I get to prototype something
and build it all at once and then move on to the next thing.
And so, I'm constantly learning.
I'm constantly excited by my work
because it's always new.
The internet lets you create whatever job that you want.
You have to be willing to put yourself out there
and it's not for everyone,
but the tools are at all of our disposal
to forge our own path.
If I had to put a label on my channel,
it's like a random girl
fucking around and finding out. (laughing)
That's pretty good, ah.
Oh my god, wait.
(light music)
Okay, I was born in Boston, Massachusetts.
I was not actually a very good student.
And so I got involved
in a ton of extracurricular activities.
I was on the track team, I did theater,
I did like everything else.
I joined my high school robotics team as a secret
with my friends and also on a whim.
There was another woman on the team
and she was one of the captains,
but she didn't build a whole lot,
even though I know she was capable.
She went to MIT.
I think that there was probably some bias happening.
But as a result, I also didn't really build anything.
I was like quiet and obedient
and I did whatever was told to me.
And so, I organized a lot of bake sales
and I raised a lot of money.
But I did not build on the robot.
And that sucked. (laughing)
And then I became a captain my junior year
and I was embarrassed to admit
that I wasn't really working on the robot.
I knew how to use tools
because I was super active on the technical theater side
of like school productions.
And it was just this social fear, I think,
of inserting myself
in this, we never had any women work on the robot.
(rhythmic music continues)
I was pretty sure I was not gonna be an engineer.
Like oh, I'm probably unqualified.
And the reality is, I just never had had the opportunity
to find out.
I am not entirely sure when I decided
I was gonna be a pilot,
but definitely once the decision was made,
it was very, very made.
The summer between my junior and senior year,
I got a job working as a line crewman at an airport.
And it was perfect,
'cause I got to work in exchange for flight hours.
But that was also what saved my engineering career.
I had had this experience at an airport
where it was very clearly lots of instances
of pure sexism, where like I'd show up to fuel
this guy's plane and he'd be like,
"No fucking way a chick is touching my airplane."
And you can look at a situation like that and be like,
"Oh, it is so clear that that is just sexism.
It's not that I don't have the skills,
because I never even got the chance to show you the skills."
Then I started looking at all these other parts of my life
and realizing like, "Oh, I never get to build anything
on my high school robotics team,
not because I don't have skills,
but it's 'cause people just assumed I couldn't
because of the way I looked."
In college, I was like,
"I'm gonna be the best engineer I can possibly be."
I joined the robotics team, I joined the rocket team,
I was like going to hackathons on weekends,
I was like building robots
for this NASA Robotic Mining Competition.
And I learned a ton that year.
There was this notion that I couldn't be super feminine
and also be an engineer at the same time.
And I was like, "Screw all of you.
I'm just gonna go compete at Miss Ohio
and see what happens."
(light music)
I will say one of the other reasons I did it
is I wanted an excuse to build a musical Tesla coil.
I read through the Miss America talent rules
and fire is not allowed.
And although fire is a plasma,
not all plasma is technically fire.
And so, I figured showing up with a lightning machine
was not technically outside of the rules
of Miss America.
So I did this musical lightning show,
and it was also part of the personal mission I had
that was tied to the nonprofit that I had founded
of trying to get girls who were more feminine
to know that they could do stuff like engineering.
(upbeat music)
Hey, I'm Xyla. - And I'm Andrew.
- And we are the team behind Beauty and the Bolt.
So, congratulations, you're here.
It was really born out of an issue I saw
with the makerspace that I worked at in school,
where as the makerspace grew,
we had less and less time as people who worked there
to sit down and help people with their projects.
As a result,
the people who were using the machines
got less and less diverse.
So I reached out to one of my friends
and was like, "How do you feel about making video tutorials
for this space?"
'Cause I think that if someone had a video to watch
on how to do it, it would lower the barrier to entry.
So we made a handful of videos.
A ton of schools and other makerspaces started using them
as their training and then it sorta like snowballed
into a nonprofit from there.
(electronic music)
Making videos for Beauty and the Bolt
was my first steps into YouTube and video creation
and especially being the one on camera.
With the nonprofit, I felt a lotta pressure
to keep my projects simple and classroom-friendly.
And as a result,
each project was getting less and less creative.
Hey, everyone, welcome to my new channel.
Thank you so much for being here on day one.
When I started my own channel,
it was suddenly like, I want to be able to build
whatever wacky crazy idea that I can come up with.
I wanna be able to push myself really hard
and make projects that I don't even think I know how to do.
(electronic music continues)
So this is the project that kicked off my channel.
What's funny is that I had every intention
of launching my channel with a cedar strip canoe build,
which is like a very take me serious kind of build,
is a cedar strip canoe from scratch.
And then I finished this and I got excited
and I posted a picture on Twitter.
And it went super viral.
Turns out, the answer is always weird art. (laughing)
(electronic music continues)
I'd like to think that by using the platform that I have,
that I am at least changing people's minds a little bit,
especially subconsciously, about who an engineer is
and what they may look like.
(electronic music continues)