NASA recently launched its "Taking Flight: How Girls can Grow Up to Be Engineers" three-part webinar series as an educational tool designed to introduce girls to the world of engineering. The series provides a pathway to achieve that dream and offers insight from the women of NASA today and how they got their start in the engineering disciplines.
“Do you like solving problems, working with other people, and making a difference? Consider a career in engineering! NASA engineers may help build a spacecraft to shoot through our solar system or soar above our home planet, or they may fly a helicopter above Mars," states NASA on its event page. “April is the month of Ingenuity—when the Mars Helicopter will attempt its first Flight. In our three-part series of live webinars, meet some female engineers working on the helicopter at NASA/JPL, who will explain how they got their start, share useful tips, and take audience questions.”
The goal outlined in the Taking Flight series is to demystify engineering, what it is, and what it takes to reach that career path. In the first webinar, Chart Your Path, NASA assembled a panel of three women guests, including Kim Steadman (Systems Engineer), Nagin Cox (Engineering Operations/Deputy Team Chief), and Samantha Hatch (JPL Human Resources), who detailed how they were able to achieve their life-long goals. Each webinar features an update with the Mars helicopter and the Perseverance rover, both with qualified women on their teams. At this point, the team was successful at launching and landing the drone on two test flights, although a third successful flight occurred on April 25.
NASA’s Kim Steadman is a Systems Engineer for the Mars 2020 Rover and Operations Lead for the SHERLOC instrument. (Image credit: Kim Steadman via Twitter)
The first panelist, Kim Steadman, has worked on various missions, including Cassini (Saturn exploration) and every previous rover mission, including Opportunity and Curiosity. Kim received both a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech. After graduate school, she began her career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where she has worked on the missions above, as well as the Mars Science Laboratory robotic space probe, and the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument.
As with other engineers, Kim became interested in engineering at a young age through her love for science fiction books, T.V. shows, and movies, including Star Trek and Star Wars, but initially wanted to become an astronaut. After she obtained her degrees, she then fired off an email to an engineer at JPL working on the Pathfinder project, who replied and said come out for an interview, which ultimately got Kim her job at NASA.
Before that, she did a summer internship at Edwards Air Force Base while still in college, which helps when it comes to gaining some experience in the job field. Kim’s advice for those looking to become an engineer is don’t be afraid of failure, as we all fail, but we can learn from that experience and drive forward.
Nagin Cox is a Systems Engineer and Manager at JPL and has worked on multiple missions, including the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Kepler telescope, and Mars Exploration Rover missions. (Image credit: NASA)
The second panelist, Nagin Cox, is a spacecraft operations engineer at JPL and has earned a B.S. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering and a B.A. in Psychology at Cornell University, and a Masters in Space Operations and Systems Engineering at the Air Force Institution of Technology. Nagin’s road to becoming an engineer began at 14 with a fascination with Star Trek and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos T.V. shows. She also had an interest in robots, specifically those that explore space. “If you really want to go where someone has never been, you want to be with the robots. They truly explore first,” states Nagin in her NASA bio. “There was one place that did that consistently, and that was NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”
To get to NASA, Nagin (born in India) began her long journey at a time when girls were expected to study the arts and humanities, and only boys could study math and the sciences. Beyond being a successful engineer, she is also a determined fighter who set out to quell the notion that women could only cook and serve food. So as a junior in high school, she looked to the U.S. Air Force that provided her a scholarship to Cornell University where she double-majored in psychology and operations research and industrial engineering.
After college, Nagin put on an Air Force uniform, where she served as a systems engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, helping build F-16 aircrew training systems. She then went on to earn her Masters in Space Operations and Systems Engineering and worked as an orbital analyst for U.S. Space Command Operations at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base. After six years in the Air Force, Nagin applied for an engineering position at JPL, where she was met with cricket noises as a reply. As luck would have it, Nagin went to a class reunion, where she met a fellow student who just happened to work at JPL, and she took over his position as he was leaving for graduate school.
Twenty-five years on, Nagin is currently a Systems Engineer at JPL who has worked on multiple interplanetary robotic missions, including the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Kepler telescope, and Mars Curiosity missions. She has also earned several accolades at her time at NASA, including having an asteroid named after her (14061 Nagincox), NASA’s Exceptional Service Medal, and NASA’s Exceptional Achievement Medal twice.
Samantha Hatch is a human resources representative at NASA’s JPL and has a talent for recruiting qualified engineers to work in the space program. (Image credit: NASA)
Samantha Hatch is unique in that she doesn’t have a degree in math or engineering, but instead has a talent for recruiting engineers for NASA who have those qualifications. Samantha is currently a Talent Manager/H.R. Business Partner for NASA’s JPL with a Masters in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology (Los Angeles). Before signing on to JPL, Samantha was employed as a Talent Management Specialist at Northrop Grumman, where she overlooked the company’s Aerospace Systems sector, which boasts 22,000 employees. Multitasking is an understatement when describing Samantha’s ability to direct, control, and implement various projects and act as a communication hub for what amounts to a medium-sized city.
When choosing a great engineer to work at NASA, Samantha first looks for some character traits – do they have a passionate, curious mind? A willingness to try new things, problem-solve, taking things apart to understand how they work are just a few of the insights she looks to identify. Of course, a background in the sciences, math, and engineering is a must; teamwork and willingness to listen to others is as well. Ideas are the foundation of NASA, and those willing to collaborate are essential traits when exploring space.
Samantha states that some of those traits might already be ingrained in girls, but they just haven’t realized it yet, including being curious and creative, building things and having fun with group projects. She points out that activities such as baking food and cakes involve math and chemistry, and building with Legos involves structural engineering, aspects of science and math that kids maybe haven’t realized are part of being an engineer.
As the first webinar in a series of three came to a close, two aspects became apparent when it comes to an engineering carrier – One, there is no set path paved in stone to reach that goal, other than a solid foundation in math and the sciences. Two, anyone can become an engineer at NASA or anywhere else if you want it bad enough. Women are just as determined as men when it comes to achieving a dream and has overcome incredible hardships to make that dream a reality.
NASA has overcome many diversity issues since its foundation in 1958 when the doors were only open to men. Pioneers such as Dana Ulery (first woman engineer at JPL), Kathryn Johnson (mathematician/computer), Mary Jackson (NASA aerospace engineer), Dorothy Vaughan (NASA supervisor/mathematician), and Margaret Hamilton (NASA programmer) have since kicked in those doors, paving the way for the next generation of women engineers.
Editor’s Note: NASA has another “Taking Flight” session on Thursday, April 29 at 4 p.m. EDT featuring Ingenuity Project Manager MiMi Aung and others.