12/18/2023 0 Comments Girl who lost her nasa internship![]() ![]() I'll never forget the night when we were in the airport in Iraq and a young man had just come back from a convoy he looked totally different to when I had seen him the previous week. Both are very dangerous but, for me, it's a no-brainer: I would rather face the dangers in space than go back to a war zone. I get very excited when I think about being up in space, partly because I compare it to going into a war zone. As a scientist I'd spent most of my time doing design work and trying to create things, so going to Iraq, helping to solve a national issue and really getting a sense of what was happening, fuelled my desire to know and to understand. ![]() I was there for four months and it was an amazing, life-changing experience, but it's not for everyone. As a lab geek, making the decision to go to Iraq was daunting, but I told myself, "I have to do this." I had to do something different and gain a new perspective. In 2003, I went to Iraq as a Technical Operations Officer with the CIA to look for weapons of mass destruction. Sexism and racism are always present, and I've had some pretty negative experiences, both at university and in my career. The intention is to stop you from progressing and limit your creative thinking. If I make it mine, it stops me from moving forward. I always tell them I have no problem with it, but other people may have and that's their problem. One of the questions young women often ask me is whether I've had any problems being a black woman working in engineering. After grad school, I went to work at Ford Motor Company in their scientific research laboratory as a Technical Specialist. We worked constantly, but we didn't think it was strange we thought it was a good way to spend our time. My adviser always told a story about how he had been out of town and stopped by the lab late on Sunday evening, and Janet (who later went into genetics) and I were there collecting data. When he started taking out the intestines, it was the worst thing I'd ever seen, and I knew I would be more suited to engineering.Īs a graduate student at the University of Maryland with my sister Janet, I worked all the time. The only reason I didn't continue down that path was because one of the doctors invited me into the autopsy room. I was doing an internship in pathology at the New York Health Science Center to figure out what it was I wanted to do. I decided I wanted to study engineering when I was 16-years-old. I guess his encouragement planted a seed in my mind. At the time, Sally Ride, who would become the first American woman in space, had just been selected by NASA. He said we could become scientists, aerospace engineers or even astronauts. I remember being surprised by how proud he was. When we were nine years old, my older brother Michael came home from university and saw our school grades on our report cards. We were the youngest of seven children my mother Luberta, who worked as a keypunch operator for a local computer company, was very protective of us and always stressed how important education was. Growing up in Syracuse, New York, my twin sister Janet and I were always interested in science and maths. Soon it will no longer be a dream.Īs a child, I wanted to go into aerospace engineering and work for NASA, but I never thought I'd be selected as an astronaut. I've always had strange dreams of just floating in complete darkness. We have to get into the space-walk suit, which weighs about 140kg, and then they lower us into the water to simulate what it will be like in space by making us neutrally buoyant, so we neither sink nor float. There are mock-ups of the International Space Station (ISS) there. NASA operates a Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) at the Sonny Carter Training Facility in Houston, Texas it's a huge pool that's 40ft 6in deep, 102ft wide and 202ft long. Space-walk training is one of the coolest parts of my job. I've always had strange dreams of being in nothingness, just floating in complete darkness or going through the matrix. He said he remembered being surrounded by the deepest black you can think of. ![]() I've spoken to a lot of fellow astronauts about what it's like going into space I remember NASA's Gregory Chamitoff describing what it felt like to space walk. As we take off, I imagine I'll be thinking about the newness of all the sounds and sights. Being an astronaut is one of those jobs where you're guaranteed perspective in life. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |