Hi!  I’m glad you’re here.  It’s nice to know that this blog hasn’t fallen into the bottomless abyss that is the Internet.

My name is Margaux. It rhymes with cargo. Also Fargo. Which is a city in North Dakota, in case anyone cares. Mostly I use it to teach people how to pronounce a French name with an “x” in it, which is very un-American as I discovered growing up in a small town in Delaware. Teachers and coaches often gave up trying to pronounce my first name when they first saw it in writing and just called on me using my last name, which is equally confusing because it’s Lopez and no one expects to see a white girl with that name. My classmates would regularly make fun of me and call me “Mar-GOX,” which is fine but pretty unoriginal. Also “large Marge the barge,” but that’s a different story.  Let’s just say that elementary school was not my finest moment, or string of moments, or whatever.

I graduated from the California Institute of Technology in June 2015 with a degree in mechanical engineering, a passion for STEM education, some friends, a deep resentment of problem sets, and more t-shirts than I know what to do with.

I spent my senior year in France, hence all the rants about the incompetence of French bureaucracy and quotable quotes that got lost in translation.  Now that I have my Caltech diploma, I’m allowed to admit how much I didn’t actually do much schoolwork while I was studying abroad.  Unless you count theatre class.

From 2015 – 2019 I lived in Silicon Valley (California) and worked at SLAC National Laboratory (not to be confused with Slack the messaging app) and was even once named SLAC-er of the month (not to be confused with slacker of the month). Although I had been traveling back and forth to Chile for work for all of 2019, I officially relocated to La Serena in January 2020, still a SLAC employee but working onsite at the Rubin Observatory as a mechanical engineer. Theoretically this telescope and camera will be up and running soon, but the dumpster fire that was the year 2020 put a bit of a damper on our schedule, so I’ll be in Chile for a while. Luckily it’s a pretty fun spot, and I also finally learned how to conjugate verbs in the past tense, which makes life much easier.

I eventually moved back to the US in 2023, and I am currently living in Lake Tahoe although I travel back and forth to Chile several times a year to continue work on the project.

If you want to learn a little more about me, I had to write a fun bio thing for work, and I talk a little bit about my path to engineering in this post. I’m also super into adventures and outdoorsy things except for spiders.

The point of this blog is to share some (mostly entertaining, sometimes embarrassing) stories from my life and beyond.  Enjoy!