While growing up in Metairie, Melissa Dotson thought she was destined for a career in medicine. Her mother even sent her to Latin camp one summer so she’d be able to read medical terms one day—she still has the camp T–shirt, in fact.
But that all changed in 1994 after Dotson’s junior year in high school, when a summer program at LSU opened her eyes to the world of chemical engineering.
Dotson and other participants would attend classes in the morning, then tour area plants under the guidance of mentors from Dow, ExxonMobil, Shell and others. “That’s when the light bulb went off,” she says. Read more in Baton Rouge Business Report’s Influential Women in Business issue.
