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.
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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...
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