Migdalia Lopez, E25, held a wrench before she could even write her name. The youngest of four daughters in a low-income Alabama household, she became her father’s unofficial assistant in the garage—a space filled with rusted lawnmowers, sputtering engines, and endless questions.

Her dad, a self-taught mechanic with experience in landscaping, construction, and consulting, didn’t know he was mentoring the family’s first engineer. By day, he worked as a janitor at Mercedes-Benz. By night, he split his time between caring for his family and fixing machines in the garage. “I wanted to be let into that world I didn’t have access to,” Lopez says, recalling the thrill of watching her dad work and hearing stories about the engineering projects happening at Mercedes-Benz. Each time she grasped the logic behind a tool or cracked a problem on her own, nerves gave way to excitement—laying the groundwork for the problem-solving mindset that would define her future.