![]() At the time, not all the young men were used to working with girls.īut I quickly rose to the top of the class and became a math tutor and, as a result, the boys wanted to study with me. I remember walking into a calculus class and the young men there asked me if I was in the right place. 'I'm 11, I Have a Physics Degree And Want To Make Humans Immortal'Īt California State University Northridge, where I studied math, I had the best mentors and professors, but it was 1993, so I was one of very few females in my classes.I held that idea to my heart and that's what allowed me to transform my life. I realized then that school was an opportunity for me to transform the way I was thinking and understand how to access information. I would wake up two hours early just to catch the bus there every day. That didn't happen, so she fought to get me into another school in a completely different area. He had filed down a ring, and when we got into an argument, he sliced my face open. When I was 10, I was in a classroom with a boy who had been recruited into a gang. School gave me the chance to learn, and it was often the only time I would eat each day, but at the same time it was extremely stressful. But I had no idea then that, as a woman of color, I would go on to launch space shuttles and educate many people across the world about science. I knew at that moment that my future was to become a scientist. I had always loved mathematics, but when I saw the rocket engines, I knew that I had a future for myself outside of what I saw in south Los Angeles. When I was six years old, I went on a field trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Of course, it was just the aircraft headlights. I absolutely loved seeing the airplanes I used to watch them thinking that they were stars that were moving. ![]() It was a very tough experience but I fell in love with rockets and engines at a very young age, partly because our house was under the flight path of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). ![]() In the '80s I grew up in South Los Angeles, in an area that was notorious for drug trafficking, sex trafficking and gang activity. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |