Rebecca
Hawkins, PE
She taught herself
to read at two and a half.
Nobody helped her. She reverse-engineered it.
By three she was doing arithmetic. By four she was programming the family computer from library copies of 3-2-1 Contact magazine — because the machine made more sense than the people around her. It had rules. It followed logic. It did what you told it. By five, in the words of the nun administering the assessment, she had broken the IQ test (and the tester).
She grew up working class in Pinellas County, Florida — a sixth generation native — on need-based financial aid, through thirteen years of Catholic school where the ceiling was twelve feet high and the curriculum was six inches deep. She finished tests in fifteen minutes and spent the remaining thirty writing science fiction in the margins of her notebook.
She also, as a teenager, wanted to compete in pageantry. Her parents told her: “We are not spending good money to see you set yourself up to fail.” So she did what high-capacity girls often do. She waited. She prepared. She studied the competitions like an engineer studies a system. She would return — on her own terms — when she was ready.
PE licensed.
System-builder.
Still building.
At eleven, a ballet teacher told Rebecca her body was the wrong shape for the stage. She filed that information under incorrect and moved on to basketball, then rugby — sober, by choice, full contact. She also sang opera. The stage, it turned out, had no objection to her.
She became a Chemical Engineer because chemistry was always the language underneath everything — under the car hood she grew up working beneath, in the train circuits she built from scratch, in the regulated pharmaceutical environments where she would spend the next twenty-five years. She got the PE license. She stamped everything that deserved stamping.
What Rebecca does in a regulated environment is not what most engineers do. She sees the whole system — every technical dependency, every regulatory exposure, every vendor risk, every timeline gap — and she holds all of it simultaneously while executing against all of it.
Where others see complexity, she sees architecture. Where teams see blockers, she sees sequences. Her clients, eventually, stop being surprised by this and start building their programs around it.
The 2.25% Problem.
Rebecca doesn’t advocate for women in engineering because it sounds good in an interview. She advocates because she has run the numbers.
In 2021, women earned 18% of undergraduate engineering degrees. Half never entered the industry. Of those who did, half left within ten years. Half of the remaining left in the following decade. At the twenty-year mark, half of a half of a half remain. That’s 2.25%.
She built her entire ecosystem of work around making sure the next woman who enters this field has something she never had: a mentor who shares the actual survival hacks, freely, without gatekeeping.
The crown is
the amplifier.
In 2021, Rebecca entered her first pageant through the USA Ambassador system. She did not place. She calls it a fantastic experience. What changed was not the result — it was the realization that visibility could be leveraged.
She does not see the crown as validation. She sees it as amplification.
As Pageant Titleholder — Mrs. Florida Emissary 2026, Emissary Pageants International Congress, Rebecca’s platform is women in STEM retention, engineering leadership development, and workplace equity — the same work she has always done, now with a microphone that reaches further.
The hard hat and the sparkly hat occupy the same shelf. The advocacy is the constant. The crown is the amplifier.
Three doors. One building.
Everything built here comes from the same source. Choose where you want to go.
At two and a half, she taught herself to read because waiting wasn’t working.
At four, she taught a computer to do what she needed because it was more cooperative than the adults.
At some point in the middle of all of that, she stopped waiting for the system to catch up — and started building better ones.
No Stark billions. No Wayne manor.
Just the brain, the PE stamp, and the blueprint.
All systems go.