From designing apps in high school to engineering life-saving medical devices, Ilsa Olsen has always loved solving problems and bringing ideas to life. A Technovation alumna from 2017-2019, she’s now a Product Engineer at Johnson & Johnson MedTech, where she helps create heart pumps that support patients every day.
Discovering Engineering Through Education and Early Opportunities
After graduating from high school, Ilsa attended Northwestern University to study Bioengineering and earn a minor in Business. “Early on, I wanted to go into a career that combined the two topics,” she says. Northeastern’s co-op program gave her the opportunity to explore multiple sides of the biotech field, working in both supply chain and quality engineering at a startup. After graduation, she continued with the company before joining Abiomed a little over a year ago.
One of her proudest accomplishments was her senior capstone project, which lasted an entire year. Her team built a system that could attach to a drone to measure gas emissions, a project that tested their problem-solving skills and persistence. “It was a lot of problem-solving, but my team was very proud when the finished project actually worked,” she said.
Ilsa admits she was once nervous about learning program tools, but those skills have become an essential part of her work today. “MatLab and Excel, as all coding languages, I was nervous to use them at first, but once I learned more, I was able to figure them out and use them effectively.”
Confidence, Skills, and the Technovation Impact
She credits Technovation Girls Minnesota with giving her both the confidence and foundation to explore technical challenges like these. The program showed her how to break down problems, experimenting with new ideas, and see projects through from start to finish.
Ilsa Olsen first learned about Technovation Girls Minnesota through her school’s engineering course, when her teacher encouraged the students to join. “There were a few girls in the class, but we had enough to make a team that first year, and then we kept growing each year after,” She recalled.
Technovation played a key role in building her confidence as a young engineer. “I think Technovation gave me the confidence to pursue a degree in engineering. It gave a really good background of how to complete each step in a project’s lifecycle and a support system to ask all the questions we have,” she said.
She also highlighted how the pitch portion of the program strengthened her public speaking and teamwork skills, “It’s beneficial to practice speaking in front of a large audience. It showed me how to work in a team to create a solution to solve a problem, and I was able to take that groundwork and use it for projects in college and in my career.”
For Ilsa, Appapalooza was always a highlight of her Technovation experience. “I always loved Appapalooza and seeing our team’s hard work being presented to the judges,” she shared. “ When I later interned for Code Savvy, it was amazing to see the end result of an event we had been planning for many months!”
Reflections, Lessons Learned, and Advice for Future Innovators
Looking back, Ilsa reflects on what she learned since her Technovation days. She wished that she had known that there is not one perfect solution. She emphasizes that you can mess up and redesign and to always continue improving. She also wants to challenge a common misconception about people in STEM aren’t good communicators or good with people.
Her story shows that collaboration, creativity, and clear communication are at the heart of great engineering. Her last piece of advice for girls considering Technovation is simple and heartfelt: “Try it out! You never know what you will learn and what opportunities will come from participating in Technovation. At the end of the day, it’s supposed to be just fun.”
From creating her first app with Technovation Girls Minnesota to developing heart pump technology that saves lives, Ilsa Olsen’s story shows how curiosity, teamwork, and perseverance can lead to extraordinary possibilities.
✨ Inspired by Ilsa’s journey?
Technovation Girls Minnesota is open to all girls ages 8–18 who want to turn their ideas into impact. Whether you are new to coding or already exploring tech, this program gives you the chance to build apps, solve real-world problems, and gain lifelong mentors and teammates.