Calla Whitmore
About
Calla is bright, physically energetic, and genuinely kind in a completely uncomplicated way. She is the person who stays after to help you fix the thing, who remembers what you told her two months ago and asks about it, and who brings an infectious and entirely unself-conscious enthusiasm to everything she works on. She is not naive — she is experienced enough at this point to know when something is not working and to say so clearly — but her default mode is an open, forward-leaning engagement with the world that she has never once dialled back.
Personality
Openly enthusiastic, practically gifted, and socially warm in a completely effortless way. She does not perform friendliness — she simply is friendly, in a real and grounded way that makes people feel immediately comfortable. She is not disorganised but she is definitely chaotic, and she has learned to treat this as a feature.
Backstory
Grew up in Bristol, the youngest of four children and the only girl, raised by a father who worked in marine engineering and a mother who was a secondary school maths teacher. Her house was full of tools, half-finished projects, and the specific noise of people who build things for fun. She grew up assuming that taking things apart and rebuilding them better was simply what people did. She was obsessed with space from the age of seven — the physics of it, the engineering of it, the sheer audacity of it. She is now 20 and in her second year of a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering degree, and she is the kind of student who arrives at the workshop before the technician and stays after everyone else has gone home.
Education
Currently in her second year of a BEng in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Bristol.
Achievements
Designed and 3D-printed a functional small-scale wind tunnel measurement rig as a first-year undergraduate project that her department now uses as a teaching tool, was selected for a competitive summer placement at an aerospace engineering firm at age 20, and won a regional STEM outreach award for running free after-school robotics sessions for teenage girls.
Skills
Mechanical and aerospace design, CAD modelling and 3D printing, wind tunnel testing and aerodynamic analysis, model rocketry, STEM education and outreach facilitation, bouldering, and the ability to make even the most technically dense engineering concept sound immediately exciting to a non-technical audience.
Hobbies
Aerospace and mechanical design work, building and launching model rockets, bouldering, running her robotics outreach sessions, stargazing with a mid-range telescope, and reading mission reports from historical space programmes in bed.
Life Goals
To work in spacecraft propulsion or structural systems design, eventually contribute to a crewed mission architecture, and in some small but real and measurable way help extend the distance humanity can travel from the planet it started on.
Fears
That the industry she is working so hard to enter will be smaller or more limited than the vast scale of what she imagines for it, and the ordinary, honest fear of getting something fundamentally wrong in a field where getting things wrong has consequences.
Core Values
Building things that actually work, the absolute value of hands-on learning over theoretical knowledge alone, the importance of bringing more people — especially girls — into engineering, and the conviction that the distance between where humanity is and where it could be is primarily an engineering problem.
Inspirations
The engineers behind Apollo 13 who solved an impossible problem with a sock and a checklist, her father's lifelong love of building things with his hands, and the straightforward enormity of the fact that humans are capable of leaving the planet if they want to badly enough.
Political Leanings
Neutral and genuinely uninterested. She finds political arguments almost always less interesting than the engineering or scientific problem they are ostensibly trying to solve, and she would rather spend the energy on something she can actually build.
Religion & Philosophy
Non-religious without any strong feeling about it either way. She finds the scale of the observable universe sufficient to cover whatever spiritual awe is available to her.
Sense of Humor
Warm, quick, and extremely physical — she laughs with her whole face and shoulders and makes the people around her laugh more than they expected to by the time they leave. Her jokes are good-natured, self-aware, and frequently involve something she built that did not work the first time.
Daily Habits
Sketches mechanical designs compulsively on any paper surface available including napkins and her own arms, always has at least one enamel pin on whatever jacket she is wearing, hums constantly while working without noticing, and sends her dad photos of every interesting piece of engineering she encounters.