FOR MUCH OF HER LIFE, MARY MARVELOUS MUDI OKUKE had set her sights on medicine. She wanted to become a doctor, and she spent the summer after high school prepping for the entrance exam. When it didn’t pan out, the hit was especially hard: “As an A-student, I think it was the first exam I’d ever failed. It was devastating,” she said.
Engineering was supposed to be a temporary fallback. The plan was to try again for medicine the following year. “But then everything really changed around me, based on the work that I was doing in the community,” she said.
Cameroon has been experiencing a sociopolitical crisis since 2017, she explained. Okuke was volunteering with Teens-4-Teens, a peer-to-peer community she helped build to help connect teenagers and provide food, school support, and other aid.
“When I started doing more research, I saw that Cameroon was way below the doctor-to-patient ratio recommended by the World Health Organization,” she said. “And even the technological infrastructure is low. Maybe there’s a reason for me to be in engineering. Maybe I am just right where I’m supposed to be.”
Founding ALYFE
After seeing the need for better patient monitoring in hospitals with a shortage of medical workers, Okuke looked to engineering for a solution. ALYFE, the startup she began in Cameroon, developed a smart system giving real-time updates on vital signs and alerting staff when someone needed urgent attention. It utilized a wrist-worn device for patients and a tablet for administrators.
“I remember the day I got the first signal on the tablet,” she said. “We saw a notification—this patient has this temperature reading, and you need to attend to them—it was so fulfilling. I was so excited.”
But limited engineering resources affected the startup’s progress. “Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to give back yet as much as I want to,” she said. “I really would like to go back and contribute to helping the engineering infrastructure back home. For that, I will need to be really good at what I do here. I cannot give from an empty cup; that’s why I’m invested so much in all that I’m doing right now.”
“All around me I saw issues that are tied to a lack of technological infrastructure—issues that engineering can solve. And that’s when I said, all right, Mary, I am up to the task of this challenge. This is where I want to be.”
—Mary Marvelous Mudi Okuke, Mechanical Design Engineer, GHT
When asked if she experienced any culture shock coming to the U.S., Okuke shared a memorable introduction to Midwest food. She worked with contractors in Indiana who brought her biscuits and gravy, and she later shared rice and peanut butter soup from Cameroon with them. “It was fun! But the food here is still a shock to me.”
On the Job
After graduating in 2021, Okuke began her career in Cameroon’s marine industry. The engineering work was interesting, she said. But floating on docks and large marine vessels? Not for her.
In pursuit of expanding her engineering experiences, Okuke moved to the U.S. in February 2023. Her work widened into industrial machinery. At Horner Industrial Group, she worked on large rotating equipment and custom machines, including a machine designed to strip copper wires so they could be recycled.
The scale raised the stakes, and the responsibilities. “When dealing with large rotating equipment, there are huge forces, high temperatures, high speeds—everything is massive,” she said. “It’s very precision intense. A single misalignment could disrupt entire systems, blowing away thousands of dollars.”
That first day on the job was intimidating, to say the least. It was also her first official work experience in the U.S. “You look at everything you need to learn and know and it’s like, I don’t think I can do this. No way,” Okuke said. “But what has helped me is just that constant quest for knowledge. Study your subject matter and have a hunger for growth.”
Now a mechanical designer at GHT, Okuke works in building systems engineering, including office-to-residential conversion projects. The growing area is a result of abandoned office spaces left underused after the pandemic, now being sold and repurposed for housing.
Her work involves studying existing buildings, calculating their energy loads, ventilation, outdoor air, and mechanical needs, and then helping determine what it would take to make a space function differently.
“Interesting fact, each time you get into a building, probably like where you are right now, the HVAC system makes you nice and comfy,” Okuke said. “If you knew the amount of time, calculations, and science behind making that space as comfortable as it is, you would be amazed.”
Other assignments she’s looking forward to include data center projects that come into GHT. “I still have so much to learn—I’m taking it one step at a time—but it’s been eight months on the job and I’m really excited about my growth so far,” she said.
The Bigger Picture
Okuke shared that she has a system for navigating all those work shifts.
“For me, engineering works on four principles: Mastery of the basics, mastery of the subject, a quest for growth and knowledge, and a passion to serve,” she said.
That final principle of service means seeing engineering as more than a job and advocacy as inseparable from engineering. It’s a chance to contribute to something meaningful through her work, she said.
Her own advocacy through ALYFE and Teens-4-Teens have been especially focused on her community in Cameroon, but she’s also passionate about reaching young women and girls. “I helped write the book, My First Period, for a nonprofit that works to address period poverty in crisis settings,” she said. The project gave her another way to encourage girls to see their bodies, voices, and futures differently.
And that’s how she thinks engineering societies can reach young people. Outreach, she said, has to be intentional. It is not enough to say an organization is serving people. “You have to intentionally look for those that truly are in need of this service and make sure you are getting to the right people.”
Okuke knows what it means to come from a place where possibility can feel distant. But she is also clear that her own growth is part of how she plans to give back.
Sarah Alburakeh is strategic content editor.
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