Transcripts of Bonnie Seaton_youtube_hq

I'm Bonnie Seaton, I work on the James Webbs Space Telescope, and I am the Deputy Grounds Segment and Operations Manager here at NASA. Music Music Working at NASA is bigger, I think than any dream I could of had. and that's why its something I didn't originally aspire to. So it's a wonderful place to work and its more than I would of ever thought and I had been here like 5 years and I got a phone call. It was a gentleman, he was calling from somewhere in the mid west. and I didn't know who he ment to get but he got me. So and I always answering the phone "this is Bonnie Seaton at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "the NASA?" i was like yeah. "the NASA where there's Astronauts", I was like Well we don't have Astronauts here, but yes this is that NASA "WOW, you guys are amazing" "I can't believe I'm talking to somebody from NASA" and its just that sense of joy and amazement, is something that I had when I first started working here, and I tell you the truth it never leaves. You just always have events through out your career, that instantly bring back that feeling. When I was growing up, I didn't have a lot of career models for women. There weren't a lot of diversity of jobs that either men or women were doing at that time and in that place in the city. So, it was very much of a factory, blue collar type of environment. So, what I saw for women like teachers, nurses, homemakers you know that like of thing. So I decided pretty early, I wanted to be a nurse. Started college State University of New York at Buffalo. I went through 3 years of classes there, i wanted to be a nurse. Finished up my junior year I don't want to be a nurse. (Laughing) So I realized that it wasn't for me. Personal makeup than what I had, so my patients were crying and I was crying. I thought, this is not how you can spend your life and spend your career, so I finally went back to school. Got talked into taking my first computer science class, computer science became my major So I completed my bachelors degree, then I started working in industry for a few months, then came here to NASA When i first started here, for the 9 to 10 years of my career, I was working for a gentleman named Bill Kelly. Not long after I finished my professional intern 2, Bill was giving me different assignments and then he would say, "well we need to have a meeting, put a team together and have a meeting about what ever this particular technical subject was. He would run the meeting and then after a couple of weeks he'd ask me to fill in, take care of the meeting, because he had something else to do. and then that would happen more and more, then all of sudden I'm running the meeting and he would the same thing with like task monitoring assignments for other little jobs he would ask me like you write the first draft, and then I'll take it from there. and what you didn't realize or I didn't realized at the time is that's how he was training me and teaching me how to do these things, and then all of sudden I turned around and I was actually task monitor for the whole effort and I would look here and it was like, when did this happen? and it was just a gradual very subtle way he had of training, that you didn't realize you were taking on more and more stuff, and all of sudden that was it and you were managing the effort. My parents had been the biggest influence on my life and I think my mom was a great influnece, she instilled a belief that I was to go to college, and you k now we didn't have money for school, we didn't have money for college. you know we're in an environment where a lot of people didn't go to college but I never doubted that I would. and I never doubted I would have a career. I wanted more than and every day kind of job. I wanted a career take me places and give me opportunities and some how my mother gave me that, without direct conversation about it, just by believing in me and she so sure that's why my future would take me. That I believed it too. There's actually a couple of things that I'd like to recommend for college age women. I strongly believe in STEM careers Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math and I think they can give you a great future, but I also think there's wide diversity of career fields. under the umbrella of STEM I really recommend you try a variety of topics, take different classes, maybe even convince yourself to take something that, at first blush, might not be something that you really think The other thing I recommend is pay a lot of attention to your communication skills, because no matter what career you're going to take you have to be able to communicate your ideas both in writing or talking orally communicating your skills. I think those are the, probably the two biggest pieces of advice that I would give... Music Music Music Music