Banks attended Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on a $32,000 scholarship. She initially majored in chemical engineering before switching to material science. Graduating in 2002, she accepted a job at DuPont headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, heading a lab that performed failure analysis on manufacturing equipment. Part of her job entailed climbing towers to check on tanks of hydrochloric acid. She worked there for 12 years.
