Hebard: A hidden treasure "Hebard earned a civil engineering degree in 1882 from Iowa State University, the first woman to do so, and soon came to work for the U.S. Surveyor General's Office in Cheyenne. Later, she was appointed deputy to Elwood Mead, the state's first engineer. ... "She earned her doctorate by correspondence from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1893, and became the first woman in Wyoming to pass the bar exam in 1898, although she did not practice law."