Be honest, be resilient

Host:Welcome to Listen For Insight. I’m your host David Ternik. We have for you Nicole Smith, project manager for Orion Testing at the Space Power Facility at NASA Plum Brook Station, and her insights on being a woman leader in a male dominated field. I send you now to our interviewer Jake Miller.

Jake: Hi Nicole thank you for joining us. So to start, as a woman that has ascended to a managerial position in such a male dominated industry and as a woman who has experienced so much, umm, who have some of your role models been and how have they affected you both personally and professionally?

8:45 (Jake) Yeah, uhh absolutely and as a woman that has ascended to a managerial position in such a male dominated industry and as a woman who has experienced so much, umm, who have some of your role models been and how have they affected you both personally and professionally?

9:02 (Nicole) Wow, yeah that’s really interesting, umm who are some of my role models. Well you know I I guess I always have to start at home. So my mom and dad are pretty incredible people and I feel like you know especially given from like the era that they came from and in like super small town Ohio and stuff, I feel like they have uhhh a very global view of things and a very progressive view that umm was probably decades ahead of the other folks that uhhh maybe they grew up with or or what have you. You know uhh my mom has always been pretty independent and umm my dad you know has always been super supportive of me and both of them grew up in big families that did not have a lot of money, and

10:00 (Nicole): They didn’t know if financial aid or scholarships were even available back then, they had no idea. So, when they got married they waited a little while to have kids because they wanted to make sure they were grown up and they were doing the right thing. And when they did had kids they said they would have as many as they could afford to send to college because we didn’t get to go and that was one, me, and they always said you can do whatever you want, but you are going to college. And so the field was always wide open, for me and maybe because I was the one I grew up playing with dolls and playing with hot wheel cars, and I had a work bench with screwdrivers, and I did ballet and I played softball and both my parents were really involved in all of that and it just never occurred to me that there were things girls weren’t supposed to do. And They were always amazing, my teachers growing up were always amazing and then going through college was incredible. I don’t think the level of pioneering really hit me until I got in the workforce. So, I think my first job as engineering and this was when I started at Lockheed and these were very technical group of people working CSE and I think there were 35 of us and I was the only woman. And there does come a point where you wake up and look around the room and you go huh. And I didn’t think this was anything out of the ordinary but maybe it is. 

(Jake):I know you have significant experience as a mentor yourself, so what kind of advice do you have for woman entering the professional world?

13:34 (Nicole ): I would say to have resilience. And some of this is similar advice I would give to any young person. No one expects you to know everything and a lot of us go through the imposter syndrome, woman especially. You get hired, and you are thinking oh my god they expect me to actually know what I’m doing and I can’t ask questions, and I have to be perfect, I have to get this right, and why did I actually get this job. The people who hired you know who you are, they read your resume, they met you in the interview, they know you are human, and imperfect, and especially if you are new hire you are not expected to know everything in that job immediately. So I would just say have confidence in what you do know and what you don’t know. Ask questions. If somebody asks you something in a meeting or a presentation and you don’t know the answer say I don’t know, but I will find out for you. And then do it and then follow up. And I think that if you are calm and showing honestly, like that, and you’re confident in who you are, um, you will be happier in the long run. And I think that you’re, uh, leaders and your supervisors will, uh, look to you as a key member of their team and they’ll appreciate, you know, the honesty that you give them. Now, diplomatic honesty, right? (Laughs) So, I mean, to me, like, that’s one of the biggest things, like knowing who you are. And then the resiliency part of it, um, you know, I guess again, you know I have a very, like, strong feminine role model with my mom and I’ve seen how great my dad is with her and with me. I guess, if I meet somebody who is a jerk, like, most of the time, I think in my path I’ve never really considered that they were a jerk because I was a woman, I thought they were a jerk, umm, so, you know, whatever. It hurts when people do bad things, but being resilient about it, and trying to stand up for yourself, I think within, um, within the system or think of ways to, uh, be able to combat that, like, in a meeting or team environment, being kind of creative about those things is a good way to be. But, you know, I have a really good friend who is just a couple years younger than me, and last summer, she was very frustrated at work. And she and another female engineer and I all went out for lunch and we were talking, she was telling us her story and she said, ‘I just don’t feel very resilient.’ And, I just looked at her and I said, ‘I know you are not a quitter, but there comes a point in time where you have beat your head against the wall long enough. And, it’s okay to walk away. It’s not quitting. It’s okay to admit that you’re done and you’ve done everything you’ve possibly can to try to fix the situation and it’s just,’ I said, ‘there’s not point in wrecking yourself over it.’ And our third friend was like nodding her head vigorously. So I guess, uh, that kind of my rambling advice for people just to stay tough and know thyself, and once you’ve tried everything to make a stressful situation better, if you cant do it, you just can’t make it better, it is okay to find the next opportunity. 

(Jake):NASA is very well known for its creative and innovative solutions to what are, quite literally, astronomical problems. What kind of challenges have you faced with the Orion project and all of your other experiences within NASA, and how have you address them? 18:27

18:33 (Nicole): Yeah, umm, so, you know, I’m not the person that is like, coming up with the research experiment to develop a new material, to solve, like, this challenge of whatever. So, um, for me, a lot of our challenges, my challenges personally, are, um, have to do with leading a team. Um, because, you know, when you lead a team of very brilliant engineers, um, we never have enough people or resources or time to get all the work done and that you want to get done. And, you know, we have some pretty mountainous technical challenges, especially in the case of the Space Power facility, which is, um, when you have one of a kind world-class test facility, you have one of a kind world-sized problems sometimes. So, um, you know, being able to, you know, deal with those technical challenges, um, in a timely manner, and not get hampered by analysis paralysis or the um you know better being the enemy of good enough um those are things that we constantly struggle with you know, NASA ii I think as a culture we may struggle a little bit too I would say I personally do um just because you know everything that we do if you have a failure it’s huge, right, um you break a one of a kind test facility, you break a spacecraft in the facility, you watch people on something and you either fail a mission or God-forbid lose the crew members. Um I mean everything that we do or you know fly something to Mars that takes months to get out there and then something doesn’t work correctly it crashes on the planet and you lose years of planning for these scientific missions. So, I mean, there’s just it’s it’s you want everything to be perfect, but the reality is, you know, you have to balance that need for perfection or that requirement for perfection with understanding that you have budget challenges and you have launch windows and you only have you know 12 people working on your staff and you know, um, you need a test done in a, a shared facility that has balancing priorities too with other programs. So, I think you know, doing that and and then also leading that effort, you know if you if you want to talk about creativity and innovation, leading that type of an effort and not stifling creativity and innovation um can sometimes be hard. But, but on the flip side, those challenges can often lead to innovation, so, you know, the the folks that work out at Space Power facility because they are such a small site, um they are really incredible engineers, and when they have a, a challenge, when we have a failure of some sort, I mean, their ability to come up with ideas on how to fix it, how to work around it, how to do it quicker and better, I mean, they’re just really, they’re incredible personnel so um they have some amazing technical talent and I’m constantly you know impressed by um their ideas that they come up with. So, uh I guess um so so you know for me, as as a project manager, you know I, I struggle I guess I struggle with balancing a lot of those things. And and it’s every day. Um so every single day we we have huge challenges and um never enough time or money it seems like (laugh)

24:33 (Nicole): My name is Nicole Smith, I’m the project manager for Orion Testing at the Space Power Facility at NASA Plum Brook Station thank you for Listening for insight.