Lauren Waslick and Kristen Aguiar discuss mentorship, visibility and the career few people know exists.
One of the PCB design community’s greatest talents is hiding in plain sight.
Ask a room full of high school students what they want to be when they grow up and you'll hear doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, maybe even influencer if we're being honest. In my own case, I wanted to be a writer. I simply failed to anticipate that the characters would be engineers.
What you probably won't hear is "printed circuit board designer." Which is somewhat ironic, given that modern life would come to a grinding halt without them.
PCB design remains one of the most rewarding careers that few people know exists. Unlike medicine, law or software development, it rarely appears on a student's radar. Most designers find their way into the field through chance conversations or job postings that open a door they didn't know was there.
Lauren Waslick and Kristen Aguiar of Newgrange Design are no exception.
Today, both are respected instructors at PCB East and PCB West, helping train the next generation of designers. Yet neither encountered PCB design prior to starting their degrees, and neither imagined it would become the foundation of a long-term career.
For Aguiar, the search was less about circuit boards and more about finding a way to use the STEM skills she had spent years developing.
"I was just sort of looking for something that had a little bit more science, a little bit more math, something where I felt like I could utilize the skills I was learning in college," she said on an episode of PCB Chat. "And so I just stumbled across the job description, didn't know anything about circuit boards, but it had training from the ground up."
Waslick's path wasn't much different.
"With my degree in math, getting toward the end of my college years, I was trying to figure out what you can do with a math degree," she said. "I knew about going into finance or teaching or grad school, and none of that was really calling to me."
A job posting in electronics caught her attention. She applied, hoping it might be more interesting than the alternatives. Fifteen years later, she's leading design teams and teaching at industry conferences.
Figure 1. Lauren Waslick (left) and the author at PCB West 2025.
Mentorship in Real Time
Aguiar remembers those first years as overwhelming.
"PCB design is one of those things where you don't really learn about it in college," she said. "Going into a job as a young adult where you really don't know anything and having to sort of learn from your peers, self-teach yourself in a very technical field, I found that to be a lot."
What helped both women navigate that learning curve was mentorship.
For Waslick, that mentorship came directly from Aguiar and Newgrange founder Matt Leary. Working in a small team created opportunities for constant feedback and one-on-one coaching.
"Once I realized that was what it was going to be like, I was able to settle much faster," Waslick said. "It's years of learning and growing, which for someone like me, who is a math major, that's exactly where I want to be."
Aguiar also credits Leary with helping her build confidence in addition to technical skills. One piece of advice he gave her early in her career stayed with her. "I don't understand why you don't talk in phone calls," she recalled him saying. "You know more than you think you do. You know more than the customer."
At the time, she thought the idea was ridiculous. "I always thought he was so crazy for saying that," she said. "What are you talking about? I'm only like two years in."
Twenty years later, she admits he was right. "A lot of engineers that I was talking to, they don't really know that much about PCB design."
As Lauren and Kristen talked about mentorship, I found myself becoming less focused on the questions I had prepared and more focused on the answers.
I don't normally host the PCB Chat podcast. In fact, before this episode, I never had.
When PCEA president Mike Buetow asked me to conduct the interview, I agreed without giving it much thought. Looking back, that's probably unusual. Most people would at least spend a little time wondering whether they were qualified, whether they would ask the right questions or whether they would accidentally talk over the guests.
I never really got that far.
Part of the reason was that Mike seemed completely unconcerned about any of those possibilities. He asked me to do it with the kind of confidence that made it seem obvious I could. When someone you respect places that kind of trust in you, it's surprisingly easy to borrow their confidence until you find your own.
Mentorship is one of those things that's easy to recognize in hindsight.
Rarely does someone sit you down and announce, "Congratulations, you are now being mentored." More often it looks like being trusted with something slightly bigger than you're ready for. Hosting this podcast was simply the latest example.
I've always liked a line from Flannery O'Connor: "Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better."
The longer I spend in this industry, the more I think that's what good mentorship looks like. The best mentors don't convince you that you're already perfect. They simply help you see that being inexperienced and being capable are not mutually exclusive.
Figure 2. Kristen Aguiar (left), Lauren Waslick and Newgrange Design founder Matt Leary. Both Aguiar and Waslick credit mentorship and hands-on guidance with helping them build successful careers in PCB design.
Seeing Yourself in the Room
I'll admit it: one of the first things I did when I started attending PCB conferences was look around the room and ask myself a very scientific question: Where are the girls?
The PCB industry has made tremendous progress, but it remains a field where women are often outnumbered. Early on, I found myself paying attention whenever I saw women teaching classes or leading discussions. It wasn’t that it was unusual, but that it was reassuring.
That's one reason Lauren Waslick and Kristen Aguiar stood out to me.
When I first encountered them at PCB East and PCB West, they were instructors. They were the people standing in front of a room full of engineers, teaching technical material, answering questions and sharing expertise. As someone still finding my footing in the industry, that visibility mattered.
Waslick remembers attending conferences early in her own career and often feeling like an outlier. "I think I was the only woman in the room, at least for some of the classes," she said. "And I also felt out of place because I was probably the youngest one in the room."
Today, both women have become part of the next generation of industry leaders, helping others feel more comfortable walking through those same doors.
"I feel like I owe it back to the industry to sort of put myself out there," Aguiar said. "It just makes it seem so much more doable for the next generation."
Fortunately, the demographics are changing. Slowly, yes, but noticeably. In fact, during our conversation, I pointed out that PCB East had recently achieved a milestone that probably won't appear in any official industry report.
"We had enough girls this last show that we were able to do the Spice Girls at karaoke," I joked.
No economist is likely to add that metric to a market forecast anytime soon, but it felt like progress nonetheless. Sometimes it shows up in conference photos. And occasionally, it shows up in an impromptu Spice Girls lineup.
An Industry Built on Hand-Me-Down Knowledge
Community came up repeatedly throughout my conversation with Lauren and Kristen. Again and again, they described an industry willing to teach, answer questions and help newcomers succeed.
"It was really surprising to me how open and helpful and just positive this whole community was as a whole," Waslick said.
I found myself nodding along. That's been my experience as well. Every industry likes to describe itself as welcoming. The PCB industry is one of the few I've encountered that seems determined to prove it.
Perhaps it's because PCB design occupies such a specialized corner of engineering. The industry seems to operate on the understanding that if you learn something useful, you're probably going to end up teaching it to someone else eventually.
By the end of our conversation, the discussion had shifted from career advice to encouragement. "If you like engineering, go for it," Aguiar said. "We need more women."
Most careers in PCB design start with curiosity, a willingness to ask questions and someone willing to answer them. Sometimes, that's all it takes to find a place at the table.
Ryann Howard is managing editor of PCD&F/Circuits Assembly; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
