"Okay, so what am I supposed to do?" I said awaiting directions from the rest of my group.

"Sit there and look pretty" one of the boys said. The rest of them agreed.

And so I did.

I was 11 years old and one of the only two girls who were in the engineering club at my middle school. The other 30 or so kids were boys and by default I somehow became more of a cheerleader for my team rather than an actual participant. I had never felt like such an outsider, but somehow when the boys gave me "busy work" like duct taping our robot together or gluing plastic appendages on it to make it more suitable for our obstacle course, I was happy.

Flash forward 5 years, and I was in the same program except this time in a more serious setting. It was an engineering internship type program set up at the Newport Naval Base. I was still one of only two girls but this time, I was the boss. I did most of the dirty work and even most of the tech work, such as programming, even though I had no idea how to.

At the end of the three-week period, my group and the others involved met in a big circle to discuss the best and worst parts of the program.

"Well I did this same program when I was about 11 years old, so I guess my favorite part this time was that the boys let me do things," I said with confidence and pride.

"No," my professor said.

My heart sank. "What do you mean 'no'?" I thought. Did I say something wrong?

"The boys did not let you do anything. You did it for yourself. Do not ever let a man define your work, or tell you you can't do something. Do it for yourself." he said.

Those words have resonated within me ever since. And ever since then I've been fighting tooth and nail to not just be the proverbial "cheerleader," to not just "sit there and look pretty."

I would consider myself a "pretty girl". I do my hair and my makeup and I drink pumpkin spice lattes in the fall while prancing around in my Ugg boots and quoting Mean Girls. There's nothing wrong with that. That's who I am. That's what I enjoy. The problem here is that people think I cannot be both beauty and brains. And that is the problem so many girls today face.

Studies have shown that although females account for nearly 50% of Advanced Placement science and math courses in high school, they only account for 24% of workers in the STEM fields. But why is this? In the STEM fields 55% of women are bullied and harassed on a basis of their sex. This is because this fields is predominantly male dominated and seen as an "unfeminine" line of work. And this really sucks for women considering that the average starting salary for people with a BA degree in a STEM field is roughly $70,000. That's a fair amount of money to be making fresh out of college.

But the agony doesn't stop there. Thinking back on this past presidential race, how many times did we see a tabloid or news story on Hillary Clinton's body image? As if what she looks like affects her ability at all to run the country. Or think about how many times we heard Trump say something demeaning about women. I mean i can practically hear his obnoxious, nasally voice saying "I'd look her in her fat, ugly face" on a loop in my head. And it's not okay.

It's not at all okay for a young girl, or any woman at all to turn on the television or radio only to be faced with an onslaught of ads and media dictated propaganda on how girls should look or act. It seems that this battle of "Beauty Vs. Brains" is a war that every woman in today's society is fighting when that shouldn't be the case.

It's because as a society we associate beautiful women as being unintelligent because they have the "luxury" of taking a couple extra minutes to do their hair or makeup every morning. We've seen it in nearly every movie from Breakfast at Tiffany's to the most recent adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

Women should not feel they have to choose to between being 'beautiful" or "desirable" and their intelligence. The scariest part about this is that women dominate one of the most important and least paid jobs in America today.

Women dominate the educational system. Think back to how many female teacher you have had in your lifetime. You, like myself and most others, can probably count on one hand how many male teachers you've had in your lifetime. I know that from personal experience, especially in high school, that the more put together a female teacher was, the less seriously she was usually taken by her students.

This is a devastating fact that women have to deal with and it's just plain disgusting. We as a society should encourage women to be both beauty and brains and to not have to define themselves by what they look like. If a woman doesn't want to do her hair and makeup every morning, that's her choice and if she does that is also her choice.

A women's looks should not detract from her perceived intelligence nor should we silence women and make them proverbial "cheerleaders" for men. We should be making greater efforts as a society to further empower women because like it or not most likely women will be teaching the generations to come. If we have empowered, courageous women teaching our youth, then our hopes for a better tomorrow might just be slightly better.