So someone must have asked me when I was really little, “What are you gonna be when you grow up?

” And I said, “Uh, I’m gonna be a pediatrician.” ‘Cause I just came back from the doctor’s office, I needed help and you could tell what they did. They made you feel better. So that’s a noble profession. So I had gotten it stuck in my mind of, “I said it. So that’s what I told everyone, that’s my goal. So you have to go do that goal.” And I did everything from, like, candy striping and volunteering at the hospital to shadowing my aunt, you know, during her rounds, to taking anatomy. Um, and it took me a long time to realize that “Yeah, I could do it and I like the idea of it, but it just didn’t, it wasn’t for me.” Like the, um, smell of the formaldehyde from the dissections and like, I was not good with my hands to be able to do the dissections. The memorization of just learning the parts of the cell, like it took me forever to, to memorize that ’cause it didn’t come easily.

But that was always my hobby

Whereas the physics, you know, the first day of class they’re like, “Okay, F equals MA. That’s all you’re gonna learn this whole semester.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, I get it.” And then as long as you get that, you can do everything and you don’t have to memorize. You don’t need your books. Like that’s, that’s all you need. And just kind of fit how my brain thinks a lot better than the uh, than the medicine did. So, uh, I gave that up, but I did end up marrying a pediatrician. So I see some of it vicariously (laughs) through him.

I happened to be watching Star Trek with my parents and my dad was actually a pretty big science fiction fan. And uh, my first episode was, I was really little like seven or eight maybe, probably too young to really understand what the plot line of the story was. But I remember the visual impact of that first episode that I saw where the, the spacecraft gets kicked out into the middle of nowhere. And then they had shown the scenes of, you know, where they were and it was just so beautiful, like the purples and the blues and it was all like flowing. I was like, “Wow, is that what space is like? That’s so cool. Um, I wanna go there, like I wanna be on the, the bridge of a ship that goes to travel in space.” Uh, and that just kind of got me hooked first into science fiction, you know, watching things like Star Trek or Star Wars.

And these were the books that I was checking out from the library for my fun reading, you know, uh, in my, in my spare time

Uh, but then, it got me more curious about what real space was like. So I would start checking out books on, um, on the planets at first like in the solar system and the moons and then kind of dabbling in, uh, the cosmology and astrophysics part of it. Like how did https://homeloansplus.org/payday-loans-mo/ the universe form? I didn’t, I didn’t translate that over to, to having a career ’cause it was very hard for me to understand what that meant in terms of a, a career. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school and I had a really great physics teacher that I, that I was able to understand what it meant to, to do engineering, like what, what it actually was to build these things for a purpose to go out. And that was when I was actually confronted with it, “Oh, maybe I can make this a career. Oh this is what NASA actually does or what it means to, you know, build a, a spacecraft to go to somewhere else.”