I wasn’t surprised, either, when it turned out there were no engineers’ coveralls that fit me. These were large, heavy garments designed for men—big men. I used duct tape to adjust the pants and sleeves on my coverall and to make the gloves stay on my hands. The lab had to special order me a pair of Red Wing steel-toe boots like the other engineers wore, because the shoes didn’t come in women’s sizes.
I was a little surprised to find that these things didn’t bother me. They were obstacles to overcome, but they had nothing to do with the work of engineering, which I loved. After all, I’d flown Estes model rockets for my Girl Scout Science badge. Now I got to work on the real thing. Finding a way to make the coverall fit was just a small problem to be solved so I could get back to being an engineer!
In my second summer, I was put to work designing and drawing. Nowadays engineers do this on computers, but back then, we had to draw our models by hand. During my third summer, I worked in the laboratory, and during my fourth year, I learned about the human factors involved in engineering. My analysis of tracking radioactive shipments in the United States was included in a presentation to Congress.
After I graduated college, my boss wrote a beautiful note to my parents thanking them for doing a good job raising me. The note went on to say that young people like me gave him confidence in the future, because he knew the world would be in good hands. My parents were proud of me, but by now, I knew it was more important that I was proud of myself.
* * *
Looking back, I find it a little surprising that I worked as a rocket scientist at all, since in those days it was so rare for women to have opportunities like that. But one reason I succeeded was that I wasn’t afraid of math. To do the kind of complex math problems that are required in rocket science, you have to understand algorithms—multistep problems—at a high level. When I was in high school and college, very few students, especially girls, got as far as calculus, the advanced math that’s one of the first steps in an engineering education. Calculus problems are complicated, and many students are intimidated by them. But when I figured out how to solve one, I had a wonderful feeling of accomplishment.
In some ways, I had been preparing to be a rocket scientist and engineer ever since the days when I counted to myself in English and Spanish as I walked to my lessons with Hermana Díaz. I liked math and numbers even before I learned to read, even before I spoke many words in English.
In middle school, when I took algebra instead of home economics, I was preparing for my career, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Back then, I really didn’t want to grow up to be a housewife. And fortunately for me, I also liked solving math problems!
* * *
After college, armed with my degree in industrial engineering, I heard about an opening for a job as an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL) in Pasadena, California. Because of my summer internship experience at the Sandia labs, I was hired.
The first program I worked on was called the Solar Polar Solar Probe (try saying that five times fast!), or SPSP for short. I was hired to help figure out the payload and testing equipment that would be carried on a satellite going to the sun. How would the equipment work in the intense heat generated close to the sun? How would it react to the radiation? How would its weight affect the amount of fuel that we would need to carry on the rocket? To answer these questions, I had to create complex algorithms—like very difficult word problems. And then I had to solve them.
It takes a long time—a very long time—to launch a new space expedition. The solar probe that I was working on wouldn’t be ready for launch for more than thirty years—sometime in 2018.
Meanwhile, after a time, I was assigned to another project at JPL, the Voyager 2 flyby of Jupiter. This was a long-range program, that continues to this day, sending automated spacecraft to the outer planets and beyond to record data and send it back to Earth. The Voyager spacecraft was transmitting amazing images and data, and JPL needed engineers to analyze them.
At the time, we didn’t have personal computers at our desks with the software to perform all the necessary analyses. Those computers and that software hadn’t been invented yet. Instead, young engineers were assigned to identify the variables in the data coming back from Jupiter. Then we could write the programs that would allow the large mainframe computers available back then to process the new data from Voyager. This was quite a task, but I continued to love what I did. It was an exciting project because we could go into the cafeteria to see the images of the distant planet and moons that were being transmitted from the spacecraft.
* * *
Through my years in college and working as a rocket scientist, I hadn’t forgotten my dream of Stanford. While I was still at New Mexico State University, I was honored to be asked to join the engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi. I even was elected president. I had wanted to assume a leadership position because I felt so strongly about being an engineer and wanted to support other students who were choosing this course of study. Not all of the other students were enthusiastic about my candidacy. But I worked hard, and I was voted into the position, the first woman to be president of my chapter. I thought at the time, and I still think, that my experience earning Girl Scout badges, selling cookies, and working as a team with other girls in my troop gave me the confidence to be a leader.
After college graduation, although I was excited about the position at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I was also interested in graduate school. I took the Graduate Record Examinations—tests required for admission into graduate programs—and then I applied to the graduate engineering program at Stanford University. Soon I received a letter of congratulations in the mail: I was admitted! Once again, all I had to do was figure out how to pay for it.
Then something happened that still seems like a miracle to me. I had been searching for scholarships to cover the cost of graduate school, but I wasn’t having any luck. The phone rang one afternoon, and I heard a man’s voice asking if I was Sylvia Acevedo. Then he said, “My name is Dr. Howard Adams from the National GEM Consortium. We want to offer you a fellowship to cover the cost of your graduate study at Stanford.”
He explained that the GEM Consortium—the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science—funded the education of underrepresented groups for graduate study in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. I realized that they must have gotten my name from the graduate school at Stanford. As a young Latina studying engineering, I was just the candidate that GEM was looking for. What I hadn’t realized was that financial aid for graduate school was called a fellowship, not a scholarship. No wonder I hadn’t had any luck finding funds!
That day, on the phone, Howard Adams explained his organization to me: “We don’t know you personally. But we know what promise you represent.” He meant that with people like me—women and those from underrepresented groups—entering the STEM fields, not only would the companies we worked for benefit, but society as a whole would be stronger. I believed him, and that helped me believe in myself.
GEM’s fellowship represented a promise to myself as well. It meant my childhood dream of attending Stanford would be coming true.
* * *
At Stanford, studying industrial and systems engineering using computer science, I found myself at the dawn of an era. Much was quickly changing since the days when computers were mainframes that took up entire large rooms. Back then, to run a program, you had to punch holes in cards—stacks of them—that were then fed into the computer. After the program ran, results were printed out on sheets of green-and-white-lined paper.
Most people, especially ordinary citizens, didn’t have access to computers in those days. I was a graduate engineering student at the very beginning of a time when computers were redesigned to be smaller and more portable and personal. It would be many years before the Internet was in common use. But Stanford is in what is now known as Silicon Valley. It was ground
zero, exactly where the computer revolution was beginning to transform our society.
Stanford University was at once like my dreams and nothing like them. The university looked a great deal like the picture I’d seen many years earlier in my fourth-grade classroom. But I was one of the few women, and one of a very few Latinos, in the graduate school of engineering. The other graduate students were from the best schools in the world. Many of my classmates had been personally selected by the highest levels of their government to represent their country at Stanford. For once, I felt intimidated.
There was only one answer: I would have to work harder than I ever had before. And I did.
In many ways, I never really left home until I went to Stanford. After my first year at New Mexico State University, I moved home from the dormitories and commuted to college. I felt I still had a responsibility to help bring up my younger brother and sister, like any daughter in a traditional Mexican family. But now I would be in California for at least a year, and I already knew that after I earned my graduate degree, I would not be moving back home. To find work in the fields that interested me, I would almost certainly have to move away from Las Cruces—and from my family. I would miss them, but I wanted to see what I could do.
I also knew that I wouldn’t be saying goodbye to my family just because I wouldn’t be living at home. After all, my mother had also left her family, but she had never forgotten them. They were all still very much a part of our lives. I would always feel the pull of my family in New Mexico, and I would always stay close to them.
* * *
After I was admitted to Stanford, Papá would brag about me to anyone who would listen. If someone happened to remark about his coffee cup with the university’s logo on its side, he would say, “Oh, have I told you about my daughter who’s studying at Stanford?”
He would never admit in my presence how proud he was of me. Papá might have wished he had a daughter who celebrated a real quinceañera, who grew up to be a mother and wife and never dreamed of working outside the home. That wasn’t me—but in the end, he was proud of the daughter he had.
Mami was proud of me too, but in a different way. Because she didn’t grow up in the United States, and because she never received a traditional education, the prestige of a particular college mattered less to her than to Papá. She didn’t really care if I went to New Mexico State or to Stanford University, as long as I got an education. Her question for me, no matter what I achieved, was “Are you happy?” And, as I finally realized, Mami asked the only question that really mattered.
At my graduation from Stanford
Epilogue
To my readers . . .
Last night, I looked outside and saw a beautiful full moon hanging low over the tall buildings of New York City. It was the same moon that shone above our neighborhood of unpaved dirt streets in Las Cruces, over my first Girl Scout camping trip, above the desert at Sandia National Laboratories, and over the well-kept lawns of Stanford University.
Like the moon, you have come with me on my journey as I have relived my early years. I have enjoyed thinking about my childhood and all the ways that I have been shaped by my family and my culture—sometimes even by defying that culture.
When I was a very little girl, if I thought much about my future, it was to imagine that I would do interesting things and have adventures. From the makeshift classroom with Hermana Díaz at La Primera Iglesia Bautista to my early days in Head Start to the many wonderful teachers I met in school, I learned to love learning, something I enjoy to this day.
Through the Girl Scouts and the family and friends who helped me along the way, I learned to create opportunities for myself. My family didn’t have much money, but I found that if I worked hard and pursued an education, new possibilities would continue to unfold. Through my parents, brothers, and sister, I learned the importance of family and caring for others.
I also drew strength from my heroes, women I had read about as a child, such as Clara Barton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Florence Nightingale, Amelia Earhart, and Helen Keller. I learned from them that we all—rich and poor—struggle against adversity. I also learned that everyone needs help sometimes. I got a lot of help along the way, and I came to understand how to take responsibility for myself. We are each responsible for our own fate, and with help from others, we can achieve success if we plan well and work hard.
There is one other source of inspiration that I could not do without, and that is you! I love speaking to groups of young people. I’m continually impressed with your energy, with your passion to improve the world, and by your stories.
In the mid-2000s, someone who was studying in the Stanford archives asked to interview me. I was one of the first—and few—men or women of Latino heritage to have gotten a graduate degree in engineering from Stanford. I was asked how it was that, as a Latina, I was prepared to do the advanced math and science required at the graduate level at Stanford. And how had I even known about Stanford, since they didn’t recruit in Las Cruces at that time?
As I answered the interviewer’s questions, I was reminded once more of how much of my experience stemmed from Girl Scouts. Learning how much cooking was like science as I earned my badges gave me the experience and the confidence to pursue my interests, even if they were not shared by most other girls. Until the Stanford interview, I had never realized that my love of reading, which began during my time in Head Start, and the curiosity, love of science, and confidence that I gained in Girl Scouts had made such a difference in my life. Those childhood experiences changed everything for me.
I was so grateful for that interview and for what it taught me that I became a passionate advocate for early childhood education and the Girl Scouts. Eventually, my work in education led me to serve as a commissioner on the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, where I chaired the Early Learning subcommittee. Then I met former Texas governor Ann Richards, who learned of my interest in Girl Scouts and nominated me for the national board of the Girl Scouts of the USA. My parents and sister had passed away by then, but my brothers, Mario and Armando, and I were ecstatic, knowing the positive impact Girl Scouts had had on our family. The Girl Scouts had given me so much, and now I could give something back to them.
I served on the national board for eight years before being asked to serve as chief executive officer of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. It is a dream come true, from the deserts of New Mexico to the skyscrapers of New York City.
I hope that my life story will prove to you that dreams do come true and that it will inspire you to create your own opportunities and adventures. Have the courage to work to make the world a better place—and I will cheer you on as you do! Thank you.
Love,
Sylvia
Me and President Obama
Official White House photo by Chuck Kennedy
A Note About Girl Scouts Yesterday and Today
As those of you who are Girl Scouts read my story, you may have discovered that some aspects of my experience with Girl Scouts, fifty-ish years ago, were different from yours. When I joined the Brownies, most girls weren’t allowed to wear pants to school, so my Brownie and Junior uniforms included a dress or skirt. There were no Daisies—Brownies was the youngest level of Girl Scouts. And girls couldn’t earn badges until they were Juniors. Even the cookies we sell now are different, as tastes have altered over the years.
Other details of Girl Scout life have changed too. At the time that I was a Scout, there were no science badges available for Juniors, so when my troop leader saw my interest in science, she had to suggest I try a Cadette badge. Today, Girl Scouts have made the STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math—a priority, with badges at all Scouting levels.
In my day, the Brownie promise was different from the promise that older Girl Scouts made. Today, Scouts at every level make the same promise. The wording of the Girl Scout Promise and Law has changed as well, but all Scouts, through our entire
history, have pledged their service to laws that include honesty, helpfulness, respect for others, and sisterhood with every other Girl Scout.
The Girl Scouts have come a long way since 1912, when Juliette Gordon Low gathered together the first troop of eighteen girls, founding an organization that would prepare young women to meet the world with courage, confidence, and character. My story is just one among those of many millions of girls who have found community, adventure, and purpose in the Girl Scouts.
When adults ask me how their daughters can have the amazing opportunities that I have enjoyed in my life, I encourage them to enroll their daughters in the Girl Scouts. A girl can join at any age from five to eighteen, and even a few years can make a difference. Girls, their families, and their communities all benefit from involvement in Girl Scouts.
www.girlscouts.org
Acknowledgments
I remember clearly the day that this book idea was birthed. It was in Austin, Texas, at the Central Texas Girl Scout’s Women of Distinction event, when I was asked to provide the keynote address. I decided to speak from the heart about what Girl Scouts meant to me and my family. Girl Scouts was a ray of light when my family’s life had been darkened by tragedy. That day, I spoke about my troop leaders, who saw my interest in science, who helped me set goals through selling cookies, who taught me to create opportunity. I spoke about how Girl Scouts changed my life, and the lives of my sister and mother, too. The enthusiastic reaction to that speech gave me the courage to tell my story.
I was privileged to be supported by gracious and generous mentors who saw the promise of my story to inspire a rising generation of young people: Dr. Nora Comstock, community leader, and Adriana Dominguez, my literary agent, have been my indispensible guitjes and connectors on this journey.
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