Ellen Stofan, NASA Chief Scientist, grew up at NASA as her father worked at Glenn (then Lewis) Research Center in Cleveland. Her father was the working on the launch vehicle that would later send Viking and Voyager into space. Her mother, on the other hand was a science teacher who took geology classes while Stofan was only 11 years old.
Thinking back, it was the nature of her parents' work that made her choose a career that involved both geology and space.
Now, Stofan is giving back to the community by sharing some pieces of advice for those who are into STEM.
Stofan said that there is no need for a person to be an achiever when it comes to math. "I struggled," Ellen Stofan says. "You don't have to be an A-plus math student. If you're a B/C student in math, people think you can't be an engineer; that's just not true."
Being the top science adviser of NASA, Stofan is hoping that being a public figure would help encourage more students to pursue STEM. Another personal campaign she took is to spend time and brainpower to help close the gap between white men and women and minorities. She said that white men have dominated the STEM field while women and the minorities been left behind despite years of investment. "The progress has been slow, and that's frustrating to me personally," Stofan tells U.S. News.
According to a STEM Index determined last year, "women and people of color earn far fewer degrees in STEM and express less interest in the fields than white men." One of the reasons is that women suffer discrimination in math hiring. Another reason is that experts usually don't encourage women and people of color to pursue STEM as "they aren't what engineers and computer whizzes should look like."
"Even if you have a program targeted at 13-year-old girls, getting them to see science as fun or coding as fun, they might have their parents say, 'No one in our family has ever been a scientist,'" Stofan says.
Stofan is interested, according to AGU Blogosphere, in collecting data that would answer the fundamental question: is there life beyond Earth?
She hopes that those who are interested in STEM will not quit and just stick with it. It may be a difficult challenge but it is worth it.
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