By the end of the night, my new name was Xyla. Xena was on the list, but the warrior princess kind of did it first. I didn’t understand the adult implications of the letter X yet. We’ll just go change it like right now.” My dad really wanted a high Scrabble scoring name and I liked X’s more than Zs because I was 10. So they named me Kayla Ray, and I’m like a Jewish Asian from Boston,not a Southern Belle.Īt one point, I was sitting at a diner with my parents and my mom said, “Pick a new name. What’s even better is my middle name is Ray. They spent my whole childhood talking about how much they regretted naming me Kayla. And then it was on the top 10 girls’ names list that year, and they were really heartbroken about it. They named me Kayla because they thought they had made it up. So changing names is sort of a family hobby. They had Foxlin as a combination of both of their names and they both changed their names when they got married.
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I have very interesting parents and they let me name myself when I was like 10. Last year, she bought a small plane – something she’s worked toward since learning to fly an aircraft while working as an airport crew member during high school (“I’d show up to fuel this guy’s plane and he’d be like, ‘No way.’”) We talked to Xyla about getting into engineering, what she loves about the internet and building a Tesla coil for a beauty pageant. She built a rocket and launched it, wearing a dress. Now, Xyla has her own YouTube channel, where she gets to “play around” with whatever material she can get her hands on in her garage. Schools and other programs used the videos to teach young people, and the project became a nonprofit where she served as executive director.
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While in college, she started a YouTube channel called Beauty and the Bolt, where she co-produced tutorials on STEM topics like electronics, math and physics. This should be obvious, but Xyla Foxlin has had to work hard to prove femininity and engineering can go hand in hand. Being feminine and having technical skills are not mutually exclusive.