We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Melanie Flores a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Melanie , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s go back in time to when you were an intern or apprentice – what’s an interesting story you can share from that stage of your career?

When I was in college, I had an engineering summer internship for a manufacturing plant in Santa Ana, California. One of my assignments was to design a recycling process. I worked feverishly for days. When I was finally done, I couldn’t wait to show it to the plant manager.

However, he wasn’t in his office. So I proudly laid my work — a thick stack of papers detailing my thought process and every single calculation — on his desk. I thought it would knock his socks off.

As I walked back to my office, I bumped into Natalie, one of the engineers who served as a mentor to us interns. With excitement, I mentioned what I had just dropped off on the plant manager’s desk. After a moment she quietly asked if I could retrieve my work so she could take a quick peek at it.

So I went back in, grabbed the stack of papers, and proudly presented it to her.

Instead of approval, she gave me this deflating advice: “Do NOT give this to him. It’s way too long.”

“But I wanted him to see all my work. All my calculations,” I objected.

“He’s too busy for that, Melanie. He doesn’t have TIME to go through this stack. Where’s the summary? You need a ONE PAGE summary.”

Dejected, I returned to my office with that stack of paper in hand, and I began to distill it. All my calculations, all the equations, all my sketches….boiled down into a simple summary.

When the plant manager was back in the office, he read my report, thanked me for the work, and promptly funded my idea that same day so I could get started. So I got what I needed more quickly because I was clear and concise. I’m grateful to Natalie for teaching me the value of getting to the point fast.

Melanie , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My career path has been anything but linear, but I wouldn’t trade a single zigzag. Every single one has given me the chance to build something fun and new from scratch.

For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed creating experiences of discovery for others – either through words or through adventures I’d craft for them. As a young girl, I would hide objects around the house for my sisters and draw treasure maps they’d have to navigate to find them. In middle school, I wrote novels and plays for fun. As an engineering major, I found a creative outlet through playwriting and Spanish musical theater.

My career since graduation has been a wild ride. I’ve been to the North Slope of Alaska, worked in 24×7 production, started up an optical fiber manufacturing facility, taught Montessori preschoolers, founded an engineering workshop for kindergartners, and led the STEM coaching team serving Easter Seals teachers across metro Atlanta. I also built an e-commerce business, OctoGifts, with my younger teen son.

I’m a teacher at heart, and I love injecting playfulness and a sense of discovery into learning. Since 2021, I’ve been at symtrain, a SaaS startup based in Alpharetta, GA. It’s a great match for my background and passions. We elevate the standard for training with digital role-play and AI-based coaching. I am enjoying the opportunity to help people and companies grow, and I’m proud of the team and the work we do. We recently won two Stevie awards. One was a Silver Award for Career and Workforce Readiness Solution and the other was a Bronze Award in the category of Corporate Learning/Workforce Development Solution.

Have you ever had to pivot?

In 2016 I was chomping at the bit to do something different. I was a Montessori preschool assistant teacher at the time, but I was starting to miss my technical roots. I had trained as a chemical engineer and worked in industry for 10 years before pivoting to early childhood education.

I wanted to find a way to leverage my background to teach design thinking to young people. I applied to two jobs that both looked like they’d offer me that kind of career growth.

I got rejected from both. One of them looked (on paper anyway) like my dream job. I was crushed.

So I set forth to achieve the growth I was hungering for, while still remaining in my position. With the support of my fellow teachers, I founded a kindergarten engineering design workshop that was inspired by a famous MIT class. The students had to design a functional shoe prototype from standard parts kits, document their work in engineering journals, and then deliver individual formal presentations to a mixed age audience (their peers, parents, and teachers).

People had their doubts that kindergartners would be able to handle this program, especially the public speaking part. After all, many adults fear public speaking! But in the two years I ran this program, every single student rose to the occasion….all eighty-eight of them, even the kids who people thought would hide under a desk or feign sickness when it was their turn to present.

This was one of the most fun and rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on in my life. It led to my first TEDx talk and countless opportunities.

I thank my lucky stars that I was rejected from both those jobs, or none of this would have happened.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In 2018, my annual mammogram revealed that I had stage 1 breast cancer. It was a total surprise – I had no family history and no symptoms.

The 15 months following my diagnosis were a blur of hospital visits, tests, and multiple operations. After one of them I developed surgical complications that landed me in the ICU and nearly killed me. Throughout it all, I held on to hope and optimism thanks to my family, friends, medical team, and the business my young son and I were building together (OctoGifts, which you can read about in VoyageATL’s July 23, 2020 Most Inspiring Stories).

I’ve always been one to grab life by the horns and confront my fears. Being a breast cancer survivor has made me even more determined to live my life that way.

Contact Info:

• Website: symtrain.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-flores/

Image Credits
Pramodh Kailas