Many kids have dreams of becoming an astronaut or working at NASA, but how many actually pursue the path to that dream? As a high school student, after watching the movie Apollo 13, Christie knew that she was interested in working at NASA. Join us as Christie shares highlights about her degree in Aerospace Engineering, her work as a NASA Academy student, and how her path has progressed through her work today. Her roles within Human Space flight include projects with the International Space Station and as an Astronaut Instructor at NASA. Christie tells us about her time working abroad in Europe, the value of her education in Project Management, the importance of internships and mentorship, and how people with a variety of backgrounds and areas of expertise can find their place working at NASA.
Many kids have dreams of becoming an astronaut or working at NASA, but how many actually pursue the path to that dream? As a high school student, after watching the movie Apollo 13, Christie knew that she was interested in working at NASA. Join us as Christie shares highlights about her degree in Aerospace Engineering, her work as a NASA Academy student, and how her path has progressed through her work today. Her roles within Human Space flight include projects with the International Space Station and as an Astronaut Instructor at NASA. Christie tells us about her time working abroad in Europe, the value of her education in Project Management, the importance of internships and mentorship, and how people with a variety of backgrounds and areas of expertise can find their place working at NASA.
Thank you for joining us today on Paths in Progress. I'm your host, Carrie Young. On this podcast, people in a variety of career fields, talk about their journey from choosing their college, deciding which majors and minors to pursue, their first jobs out of college, and all of the hurdles, detours and victories along their path through today. Our goal is to help students hear about a variety of exciting opportunities out there and understand what day-to-day life is like in these careers. I hope you enjoy and learn from our story today. Thanks for listening.
Carrie:Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We are here today with Christie. She has had multiple roles in NASA and flight operations and human space flight programs, including as a flight controller and an astronaut instructor all the way through today where she's managing Artemis the lander flight operations team. She has a Bachelor of Science and Aerospace Engineering from the University of Kansas, and she also has a graduate certificate in project management. Christie, thanks so much for joining us today.
Christie:Thank you for having me.
Carrie:I'm so happy you're here. So to get us started, I know there's a lot of people out there who have dreams of working at NASA, right? Whether it's a childhood dream or something that just people have this dream, right? And some people take that seriously and go for it, and some people don't. But can you tell us a little bit about how your path started in this industry or maybe when you started thinking you would wanna work in this industry, and then how you approached that as you were looking for colleges?
Christie:Absolutely. So I think it started a little bit later for me than maybe a lot of other kids out there. My story kind of funny actually. I hadn't really decided, you know, early in high school what I wanted to be. Earlier in life, I was really interested in maybe being a writer. I really enjoyed English and literature classes, but I also really loved math. So it was the summer before my junior year, and a movie called Apollo 13 came out. Oh yeah. And I went and saw it with my parents and it, it just blew me away. I couldn't believe what I was seeing and that that Kind of thing actually happened. If you're not familiar with the Apollo 13 mission, there was a very significant anomaly where, the astronauts, it wasn't clear that they were gonna make it back to earth safely. And it took a huge team around the globe. And in particular in Houston, Texas at Johnson Space Center, to figure out what to do about the situation and get them home safely. And that just struck a chord with me that I couldn't let go. And I remember the credits rolling at the end of the movie and I looked at my dad and I said, how do I do that? That's what I wanna do. Wow. It was like so instantaneous for me. And he just like didn't flip a beat and just said, you should be an aerospace engineer. And it was kind of interesting because no one in my family, I'm like the only engineer in my family. So I just hadn't really been connected to that profession before. But the movie did it for me and, and honestly that was the moment that just kind of set the stage for where I am today. So coming out of that, you know, I started thinking about aerospace engineering specifically, there's lots of options to work at NASA. You don't have to be an aerospace engineer, but I was pretty focused on wanting to have that specialty. But I will tell you, I work with all sorts of people with different educational backgrounds, lots of different engineering disciplines, science, math, any kind of those core technical degrees. So, when it came to searching for schools, I was really early on in getting started with that. You know, there wasn't as much information on the internet back in those days. Right. But I also started kind of getting into the aviation side of things. That is something that I get from my father. He worked in general aviation, more in the marketing and advertising area, but he took me to a big annual air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the summer before my senior year. And we're walking around and I see a University of Kansas Aerospace engineering booth. And like you, we talked before we started here, I did not know that the major state university just down the road from where I grew up, had an aerospace engineering program. And I talked to the dean there. We made a good connection and I was so excited because it felt, I think, a little more tangible for me growing up in Kansas to know that, hey, I could start my path pretty close to home knowing that, you know, I was probably gonna move away eventually to go do my professional career somewhere else.
Carrie:Yeah, that's awesome. And it's awesome that you had somebody who was just so encouraging to you. Cuz you know, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who see a movie or see a TV show. You know, we've all been impacted by things of the media that we've seen, often that glamorizes a particular career path. Right? And so like to turn to your parent and say, oh yeah, I'm interested in that. Not all kids are gonna get the encouragement that you got right away from that. Right. So that's awesome that you had that.
Christie:Yes, absolutely.
Carrie:So did you have your sights set on NASA specifically after watching that movie? Or you just kind of knew you wanted something in that realm? How were you kind of envisioning that for yourself?
Christie:I did have NASA kinda set as you know, the goal. But I don't know that I believed at that time whether it was achievable or not. I will say specifically, I talked about the team on the ground that was helping solve the problem, right? The mission control aspect just seemed so appealing to me. Really at the time, we're talking like the late 1990s now, when I was in school that NASA was really the only place to do that for human space flight. That's not the case today. But it, it certainly was, you know, over 20 years ago. So I think that's why I had my heart set on NASA specifically. Yeah.
Carrie:As you started college, were you having conversations with professors about what you wanted to do or were you looking at NASA internship possibilities? Or was there anything you were kind of looking at outside of your actual coursework to make steps in that direction?
Christie:Yeah, so one interesting thing is the program that I joined, at University of Kansas, it was a very small program. I think I started my freshman class was 42, and by the time we graduated 16 of us. So we're talking really Wow small. And also just based on the makeup of the professors at the time, the program was really focused more on aeronautics. So a lot of my coursework was based on aircraft design and how airplanes work, and I loved that too. I definitely developed a passion for airplanes as well. But the space side, we certainly had coursework in spacecraft design, but it was, not as much of a focus. I still wasn't probably sure in the first year or two that that space was really where I was gonna end up. And in fact, my first opportunity with NASA came up my sophomore year. There was a program that through the university, was advertised as called NASA Academy. They don't have'em at all of the NASA centers, but there were a handful of them that were doing this program. And it was just kind of a one-off, not an internship, but just one summer where you go to a field center and you do a research project. It was also focused on industry and learning about what was going on, you know, beyond NASA and all the industry that supports the space program and aeronautics, all of the missions that NASA does. There was a strong component of leadership development as well. So that just sounded like it was such an amazing opportunity. University of Kansas in particular, usually always sent a student. Our state had a really strong space consortium, that funded students to go do opportunities like this. Oh, wow. And it was good for our university because, the standard way of getting into NASA directly, as a college student is through, at the time it was called co-op program. Today it's called NASA Pathways, and that is a multi-year kind of commitment where you take a semester or a summer off and you go actually work directly for NASA as a student intern. That was not an option for me at University of Kansas just because our program was so small and we were not able to take a semester off because they didn't offer every class every semester, if that makes sense. So like if you needed to take Flight Dynamics one and Flight Dynamics two, if you missed it in the fall, you would have to wait a full year to take it and it would just string out the number of years you're in school and so, mm-hmm. I knew that wasn't an option. And NASA Academy was a great option, so I went for it. And miraculously, like as a sophomore, I got selected and I was able to go do that program the summer before my junior year.
Carrie:So as you were doing that, did the career path start to become more real to you? Like more of a possibility, and did you start to kind of envision options that you could see for yourself?
Christie:It did. The NASA Academy program that I got assigned to was at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center out in Edwards, California. They are heavily focused on aeronautics research. But just the fact that I got to go work at a NASA center, at that point in my life was amazing. It opened my eyes to so many possibilities. I met so many new friends that were passionate about NASA the same way that I was. And the program itself, again, it exposed us to the broader agency. We got to travel to Washington DC and go to NASA headquarters. Dryden wasn't too far in California from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so I got to see how they do all the deep space missions from that facility. So, I mean, just my perspective continued to grow on what the possibilities were.
Carrie:So what were the kinds of things you were doing on a daily basis when you were in these NASA programs as a, were you called an intern?
Christie:A NASA Academy student is what it was.
Carrie:So what the day like look like when you were in that program?
Christie:Yeah. So each of us were assigned to a specific branch with a mentor. And the mentor would give us each different project. So I was in the aerodynamics branch. I did a handful of really cool research projects. And it was so great because you're actually making a contribution, right? One of my projects was working on a new concept for a commercial airliner, and it was called a blended wing body concept. Back in the earlier days of aviation, flying wings were a pretty common design. And so there was an idea of could we take that and apply it to future commercial airliners that we all fly every day for personal travel. And so, I built some software code to help take some of the modeling that they'd done in testing and interpret the data so that engineers could see how it was performing. So that was my research project. Again, I mentioned we did a lot of different field visits. There were a lot of aerospace companies in the area that we would get to go visit and tour and see what kind of projects they were working on. At the time there were so many exciting aircraft still flying. And NASA Dryden, I should mention, it's now called NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center named after Neil Armstrong because he did a lot of test flights for the lunar lander of Apollo back in the day. And so they ended up renaming the center to Armstrong. But, that NASA center is co-located at Edwards Air Force Base. And so there are a lot of military programs going on at the time that were super exciting as well. So we would get to go out onto the lakebed and watch some test flights. We would get to sit in the control center where the test flight engineers were monitoring their payloads that were flying on the different aircraft. So really a lot of hands-on exciting things. Probably some of my favorite experiences were actually getting into the flight simulators for some of the NASA aircraft that were operating at the time, including the SR 71. So if there's any aviation buffs listening to this, that was just kind of an, a surreal experience. The military was no longer operating that aircraft, but NASA had two of them that they were still flying. And we got to witness a lot of that and I got to fly the SR 71 simulator, which was just an amazing experience.
Carrie:As you go through this kind of program, especially with how small it was, was the faculty like helping guide you all as far as like first steps in your career path after graduation? Or did you kind of feel like you were already locked in with these NASA programs, that you had guidance on that side of things to lead you to positions after you graduated or where was that kind of mentorship coming from or that guidance coming from for you?
Christie:Yeah. The mentor I had my first summer was just an incredible, incredible mentor. I mean, just from his technical knowledge, but also just put so much focus and effort into helping students get the most out of the experience and get exposed to all of the possibilities and just like infuse the enthusiasm, you know? I talked about my research project. I mean, that's long hours sitting at a desk on a computer writing code and testing things out. But he was able to tie that to how it fit into the project and the program and what we were learning as an agency. And it just really stuck with me. Coming out of that, I mentioned that I was there as an NASA Academy student, but coming out of that first summer, so. It's a one-time deal. You don't get to repeat it. And I did it really early. The program, actually, you're only eligible after your sophomore year. That's the earliest you could do it, but most of the people are more like seniors or even graduate students. Yeah. So in a way I was so excited, but then I thought, well, Gosh, what am I gonna do next summer?
Carrie:Right? How do you top that?
Christie:Yeah. How do you top that? And what am I gonna go do? What was so exciting for me is they found a way to bring me back the next summer as a NASA intern. Oh, so I didn't get to go do all of the traveling and trips and field center visits and that kind of thing, but I went back to the same aeronautics branch, got a handful of small little projects and got to help out for another summer. So I did that, in between my junior and senior year. And then, even more amazing, you know, I got back to school in August and I got an email, from someone back at NASA Dryden saying, Hey, we have a civil servant position opening that we need to fill now. And if you're interested at all, we recommend you just say yes and you'll have a job when you graduate next year. But it's also non-binding, so that was just an absolute dream. Right? Wow. I mean, I, I couldn't believe it going into your senior year and having a guaranteed job with NASA. Ultimately, I didn't end up going back there and we can talk about that when you're ready too.
Carrie:Yeah. Why don't we go ahead and talk about that? Because I think that's one of the, obviously the biggest stressors for graduating students is what the heck am I gonna do now? Right. And some people are trying to line that up far in advance. And some people Think they've lined it up and then something happens, and then some people are graduating without an opportunity there and they're freaking out. So, I mean, there's all these different kinds of situations. So yeah, why don't you tell us what happened with yours and how you were going into that period of graduation and moving on to your next step in this career that you've created for yourself.
Christie:Sure. Yeah. Again, I started my senior year knowing I had the option, which felt really good. But I think in the back of my mind, it just kept gnawing at me that I loved aviation. But space had always been the ultimate dream since I had set out on this path. And so I started doing some research. I will say getting a civil servant position, and that just means you work directly as a federal government employee for nasa. It is not easy to do if you don't go through the co-op and NASA pathways program as it's called today. And I knew that, but I also knew space was something that really was at the heart of what started this whole passion for me. So I started looking into opportunities down at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. There was a company at the time, it doesn't exist anymore, called United Space Alliance. And they had dozens and dozens of job openings for fresh outs, with an undergraduate degree, to become flight controllers and astronaut instructors. And that just sounded Oh wow. So beyond exciting to me. So I applied and they called and they brought me down for interviews. And this was, I think I did it at the end of the holiday break. So January timeframe, kind of midway through my senior year. They were really ramping up, just because the International Space Station program was finally getting underway. It had been in works for many, many years. And they were ready to start actually flying elements and start building up the space station. And so they were hiring both for space shuttle positions as well as ISS positions. I interviewed for five different jobs, while I was there for a visit and Wow. Ended up getting an offer. And so, With that, I had a really hard decision to make, as far as whether I went with the civil servant position in California, or, took this contractor job down in Houston. It was not an easy decision for me. You know, the California thing, I'd spent two summers there. It was a known quantity. I knew exactly what it was, not exactly what it was gonna be like, long term. But I had friends there. I had mentors there and I really didn't know anyone down in Houston. But the job sounded so appealing. The other thing I really had to weigh was how important was it for me to start as a civil servant or be a contractor? You know, there's a little less job security. But there was, again, so much work going on. It seemed like a pretty secure kind of position as well.
Carrie:And that's common for NASA, right? It seems like a lot of people who work with or for NASA on some kind of contract.
Christie:Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, there's way more contractors that work at NASA than civil servants, for sure. Ok, ok. And especially early in your career, it doesn't matter much. Everyone that comes outta college, at least in flight operations, was doing the exact same jobs.
Carrie:So I guess first of all, go ahead and say how you went through that decision making and what you were kind of weighing and how you made that decision, and then what happened?
Christie:Yeah, so I was really struggling and again, went to my dad and said, how do I figure this out? This is such a hard decision. And he offered up a tool, which was perfect for a budding engineer because it's very analytical. He called it a multifactor index. It's basically just a table that you fill out yourself, and you weigh like kind of all of the decision factors. Mm-hmm. You list them out. And for me it was things like location. You know, would I rather live in the desert of California or a big city in Houston, Texas? What the job itself entailed, like the differences there? Knowing people, not knowing people, what my future aspirations were. Is it more important to get into the space side of things or stick with aeronautics? So you kind of list all those things down and then you weigh them. How important is it? You know? And then mm-hmm. You kind of hide that part and then you score each of them, for the two options. And so I went through that process and it was really helpful for me. But in the end it was interesting because, I did all the math and I, I figured out what the final score was gonna be. The result told me to go to California. And I had this gut reaction that said, no, that's not what I wanted do. Ah. In that moment it was really clear, like, oh, that's not what I expected it to say ultimately, and it's not what I wanna do. And so, It helped me make the decision even though it was telling me a different answer.
Carrie:That is so interesting. Yeah. Oh, wow.
Christie:It was interesting and I've continued to use that for my own personal life, you know, just making decisions. Sometimes it's just a really good exercise. And I also share that with a lot of the folks at work that I mentor these days, if they're going through a similar, you know, not sure whether to apply for a job or that kind of thing. I always offer that up. I'm sure it doesn't work for everybody, but it sure has for me.
Carrie:Well, and also just the amount of pressure, I think right out of college, you know, you're finally at a place in your life where you have this credential, right, that you haven't had before and you've worked so hard over four-ish years, you know, depending on what kind of program you're in. There's an expectation too, right? You're graduating from college, you're getting a degree in X, Y, or Z. You're gonna go get a job that your degree has supposedly prepared you to get or has led you in a particular direction. Maybe your family has expectations on you with that. So it's like a huge thing. So I think there's this extra layer of pressure for people to get the best thing they possibly can or make the right decision. Cuz you feel like a misstep at that point in your life is huge, right? When in reality, we know, looking back on those years and that age, we know that it's okay if whatever you choose in the beginning is not the right choice, or you end up changing your mind or you end up taking a different path. Or perhaps that job prepares you in a different way for something else, you know? And that's the purpose of it or something. It's so hard to make that decision just to make the decision for yourself, right? But also there's just all of these extra layers of pressure and expectation put upon people in that particular period of life.
Christie:Yes, I think that's true, and I remember feeling that way. And I will say I am probably in the minority of my friends and colleagues. You know, ha that that first job, it does feel like it's so important to make the right choice, but so many people don't fall in love with the first job or Yeah. Find something else. And, and that is perfectly normal and valuable too to like keep your mind open and not, this is it forever. Right.
Carrie:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So once you took that first job, what was kind of your daily job? What did it look like and did you feel like you were prepared for what that was? And once you were in that type of role and you were doing what it was you were doing every day. Was the same type of career path still in your mind, and you were kind of following the steps to get there. Were you starting to be open to other types of roles as far as your career path went? How was that period of time for you in Yes, in that context?
Christie:So, when I started my first job, in Houston, It was in flight operations. It was called Mission Operations at the time, but I'll just call it flight Operations here. They have a very structured training program, which was wonderful, because they had been, you know, conducting human space flight operations and training flight controllers from the very beginning of human space flight. Yeah. And so there was a lot of just knowledge. And again, they needed, so many people trained up to do this because International Space Station was gonna be operating 24 hours a day every day of the year, with humans on board. So really highly important critical operations. Life saving things that we had to learn. Yeah. And so it was a really strong training program. From day one, I mean, there was a lot of studying, right? So you come outta college, you think you're done hitting the books every day, but that was not what it was like for me. Because you get assigned a subsystem and you have to learn all the details about how it works, how it's operates, how it's designed, how it can fail, how you recover from it, when it does fail, those kinds of things. And then really you start on this flight controller training path. For me, I got certified as a instructor first, because that was faster and they needed more instructors. And so that was really exciting. I mean, literally within a handful of months Of starting the job, I was training astronauts on my subsystem for the International Space Station. Wow. Which was so exciting. And then not long after that, I started my own flight controller training, which entails a lot of simulations where we sit together as a team in the flight control room with a flight director and, they start throwing failures at you and you have to learn how to recover from them. So I always really enjoyed those exercises. They were stressful, but you learn so much. You make a lot of mistakes in the beginning, but as you get closer to certification, you kind of figure out the methodology on how to handle those situations.
Carrie:Can I ask about that just from a mental health standpoint? You hear about like with air traffic control as an example, you know, that there's that daily stress of real life emergencies that you have to remain calm and like click into your training and do technically what you're supposed to do and guide someone else to do something, you know, from a different location. Do they have any kind of guidance with that type of stress and anxiety when other people's lives can be in your hands or your training other people whose lives will be in their hands in that type of situation to stay calm in your moment and do your job I know as part of your training, but what about the toll that that can take on people. Is that something that they would talk about with you all, or have any guidance with how to deal with that off the job?
Christie:Yeah, and you know, I wouldn't say it's a separate kind of resource. I think it's kind of baked into the culture. You get a lot of that through the mentorship and through your peers and through your superiors in learning how to do the job. My generation, I was in elementary school when the Challenger accident happened. Yeah. And that also, you know, stuck with I think all of us who sat in our classrooms that day and watched it happen. Unfortunately another accident, our last one happened with the Columbia Space Shuttle, not even three years into my career in Houston. And that was something I have a hard time putting into words, what that experience was like. But it certainly, feeds into everything you do every day. It's in the back of your mind, every decision you make, whether it's an input on how to design a piece of hardware or how the testing out, making sure software is working the way it should. We're really nailing down all of the procedures that we use for the astronauts to execute while they're in space, how to respond to emergencies, all of those things. You have to be very diligent. And we have what we call the stone tablets, which is a list of just things that we keep in mind as flight controllers to protect the crew, to protect the vehicle, and to protect the mission. And those are instilled with us from the very beginning. And we talk about those things. You know, if we go through a simulation and things don't go well, we debrief every time, whether it goes well or not, but when it doesn't go well, we talk about the consequences. We talk about what that means, and then we go back to our offices and we talk about it more as a team. And we support each other. When you're kind of going through the emotional aspects of that as well. I mean, NASA actually is pretty progressive, I would say, in all of the modernization of those things. We always have had, since I have been there, an employee assistance program, which doesn't have to be work related. If you're going through something in your personal life, that you're struggling with, those resources are available to any employee to go talk with a licensed specialist to help you through those things. So that's another avenue outside of just your work colleague and the culture that we support each other to be able to utilize if needed.
Carrie:Yeah, that's great. So with this first position you were in, how long were you doing that and what types of things were you learning as you were going through those first few years?
Christie:I was in that first position for about five years. I think actually it's the longest I ever stayed in one position. Cause since then I've bounced around a lot, which isn't normal. It's just been the way it's ended up for me personally. But, I learned kind of the foundations of human space flight and operations, through becoming a flight controller from getting certified, supporting actual missions. You learn how to build all the operational products, the procedures, the flight rules that tell you what your constraints are, and they're kind of pre-thought out decisions on how you handle decision making, testing out displays and software. I got to do a lot of hands-on work just because of my subsystem. Part of our job was also, managing all of the maintenance on the International Space Station, which was really kind of a new aspect. We'd never had a spacecraft that didn't come back down to earth. Right, right, right. And now this thing has been up there for 23 years and we've continued to build it up. Things were gonna break and we had to fly spare parts and have the astronauts trained and ready to repair anything that failed. Because of that, we, my team was highly involved with the buildup of the actual elements before they launched into space. And that was so much fun to actually get your hands on the real space hardware, see how it was all coming together, kind of building that mental model of what the astronauts were gonna be seeing when they're up in space, making sure we understood what tools were gonna work to fix certain things. And the other really cool thing about the ISS is just the international aspect, right? We have countries from around the world who have contributed. I actually got assigned to one of the modules that was being built in Italy, and I was going over there every six to eight weeks as they were installing more hardware. So we could kind of see behind all the panels, what everything was looking like, taking images. And then I would go back and write the procedures. And how to access different components and how to repair them.
Carrie:Wow. So kind of backing up a little bit, but staying within the same time period, did you feel like there were certain classes in your college program that really helped prepare you for this early stage of your career? Or was this really more of an on-the-job training situation?
Christie:I would say it's a combination of both. Right. I was not taking a lot of specific technical knowledge that I learned in school that directly applied to learning how the ISS operates. However, having just that engineering degree teaches you how to think about things and how to understand how systems are designed and operate together. So just kind of that fundamental engineering background was super helpful. Also, you know, I had no interest in being a computer scientist, but they made us take a programming class and I used that both with my research projects I did during my summer internships during college, but then also once I got to Houston, one of the very first things I did was building telemetry displays so that we could monitor the data coming down from International Space Station and see how the systems were functioning. If I had not had any programming experience, that would've been a pretty big leap. But I was able to really kind of jump in and understand how I needed to do that work, even though it wasn't the same code language. I understood the basics of programming.
Carrie:You said you were in that initial kind of position for about five years, what led you onto the next thing?
Christie:The next step was a pretty drastic one. I ended up leaving USA and moving to Munich, Germany, to work on a contract for the European Space Agency. Still for the ISS. So I mentioned the international aspect of ISS which is really one of the most amazing parts of the program. I think anyone that supported ISS would say that. The Europeans were getting ready to launch their research module, their own laboratory, to the ISS and they needed to build up a team of flight controllers to operate it. And they were looking for people for experience. So actually my now husband moved out there first. It was intended to be temporary, but I would go out and visit and think, wow, I sure would love to live abroad too. This is an amazing experience. So I ended up getting a position there as well. I was there for about three years. Helped again them get kind of their operations team up and running all the operational products built, all the simulations, all the same things that I had gone through for my first job. But now I had that experience that I could help the team there get ready for real time flight operations.
Carrie:Yeah. So was that something you literally just applied or did you use a network to kind of ask around about positions or how did you approach that?
Christie:Definitely a network. There had been at least one other American who was probably the first to get in on that. He had been a flight controller in Houston. So it was definitely through a network to get the connection. I don't think I even interviewed in person. I think I just sent a resume and they recommended me, and I had the opportunity. So that was never in my life plan that I was going to go live abroad and work in Europe. But it was just such an awesome opportunity that I couldn't pass up.
Carrie:Yeah. Well, and it's something for students to think about too, is when you enter a particular industry, there's a lot of different places potentially that you can do the thing that you're doing right? And so a lot of people have other parts of their life where they're making that decision, whether it's maybe where their family is or that even the type of climate they wanna live in. Maybe it's close to where they are at the time that they're applying for the job. But there are these periods of time in your life, and I think it's commonly for people in their twenties, right? Before you have major life commitments, you know, like a mortgage or kids or anything that you could stop and say, I could do this work in this place abroad or in this dream place I've always wanted to live or go just for fun and experience a different location or culture or region. But that's such a important thing to consider, at least to kind of think about it like, is this something I could do? Is this something I could use my network or apply for positions or something and still be in the industry and be doing the thing I wanna do, but just think about the location, you know, where I am and how that could be a different life experience.
Christie:Yes. That became really important to me. And I had never traveled abroad until I started doing it as part of my first job. I mentioned getting to go to Italy all the time, and honestly I don't know that I would've had the courage to even consider living abroad, but I had been going so frequently and really enjoying experiencing other cultures and it definitely opened my mind to that possibility.
Carrie:Yeah. Do you feel like that part of your career path, living abroad, do you feel like that changed you in some way or perhaps helped you learn something about yourself you didn't really know before?
Christie:Yes. You can't have an experience like that and it has to change the way you see the world, right? Because Yeah. Yeah. All of a sudden you're living in a country where English isn't the primary language and just the cultural adaptations that seems so foreign at first. For example, everything's closed on Sundays, right? Yes. Right. And so you have to do your shopping on Saturdays. It kind of dragged me nuts a little bit. It's like, no, I wanna be able to, but because everything's shut down on Sundays. That's your family time, that's your social time. That's the day to relax. And I came to cherish that so much. By the time we left that, when I came back to the United States, it was like this reverse culture shock where everyone's just go, go, go all the time. There's all these conveniences. You can go shopping 24 hours a day. And you know, I really saw the benefits of what I had experienced over in Germany.
Carrie:So you said you were there about three years. Was there anything about the actual work you were doing that was a lot different or was it pretty much the same type of work you were just in a different place?
Christie:The type of work was very similar, which was actually great because, you know, that was such a known quantity and it was really what I helped bring to the table was I knew I had a lot of experience in that even though I was really only five years into my career. That part was easy. But what was new and what it allowed me to focus on is just working with an international team. While I was working in Germany, there were people from all over Europe that were there learning how to be flight controllers. All these different languages being spoken, getting to know everybody. And really seeing NASA from an outsider perspective too, as being part of an international partner team and not part of the NASA team. That has paid dividends, since I came back. Just understanding kind of that outsider perspective and how our international partners think and operate, which is different than we do at NASA in a lot of aspects. Of course, we have a common mission and goal, which is what makes it all work together.
Carrie:So what led you to leave Germany then?
Christie:It was always going to be a temporary thing. My partner, now husband, ended up applying for business school. He wanted to switch careers. We had met at NASA in Houston, and he applied and got into business school back in the States. So I decided to come back at the same time and I really just wanted to go back to JSC. I had kept in touch because I knew I was coming back, with a lot of my former supervisors and management team. Once we had kind of decided on timing, I reached out to them and just said, Hey, keep me in mind if you have any openings. Again, I'm gonna sound like a broken record just from, I was so lucky. They happened to have a civil servant position open, which is called a critical hire, in NASA speak, probably federal government speak, where they can hire an experienced person kind of at a higher level versus a fresh out with an intern background to directly come in and be a civil servant. It wasn't a guarantee, but I applied for it and got the position. So I was able to move back to NASA and finally got that civil servant job that I'd been hoping for all along.
Carrie:Nice. What was different about that work and that position?
Christie:Yeah, so I switched programs entirely. I was no longer doing international Space station work. I was working on a program called Constellation, which at the time was the return to the moon program for NASA, which was super exciting to me. We had a whole new architecture with a new rocket in development, a new spacecraft capsule in development, a new lander in development. It was Interesting because I was back in flight operations, but I was working on a program that wasn't gonna be operational for quite some time. Yeah. And I went back to a part of the organization where all of the space shuttle systems, flight controllers and instructors resided. Our small little office was looking ahead to these Constellation vehicle operations and getting prepared while the rest of the division was really flying out the remainder of the space shuttle flights. Because, you know, they had decided to retire the space shuttle once the International Space Station was finally built. And so we were kind of the small team again, leveraging what we knew our flight controllers were gonna need to be involved in as far as influencing design and thinking about what the operations of the future were gonna look like.
Carrie:Wow. So how long were you working on that team?
Christie:Well, that's an interesting question. Not as long as I anticipated. One of the things about NASA and human space flight is we are in a lot of ways at the whim of our government and our politicians. Everything we do is driven by Congress and the White House and kind of what their vision for America Space program is. So I came back in 2008 to start working on Constellation, and in February of 2010, the new president's budget came out. It was a shock to us all, but in there was canceling the Constellation Program. Wow. So that was a really rough point, I will say professionally. We were kind of shocked. Didn't see it coming. Had so many exciting things underway for this new program that was gonna replace the space shuttle. So now not only is that canceled, but space shuttle is still being retired and the future of human space flight was really uncertain.
Carrie:Is it just kind of always a possibility when the new budget comes out, something could happen? Like does NASA communicate that to people just to, you know, this is what our eyes are on? Was there not any kind of talk about that this is a possibility or was outta left field?
Christie:Really good point. It's always a possibility, right? And you think back in history, you know, the Apollo program was supposed to operate way longer than it did. But after we'd successfully landed people on the moon, a handful of times, you know, it wasn't as exciting anymore and there wasn't this longer vision of what we should be doing there. And so the Apollo program got got canceled as well. And I'm sure there's lots of smaller projects and programs, before then and since then, that always kind of surprised the people that are working on them. But you're right, I mean, because it's federally funded. You're always at risk that something gets changed or canceled. Especially as we have administration changes. I will say for me, I was probably naive at that point, right? I'm not quite eight years into my career, things had been going just as expected, and I really didn't understand probably that that was a potential risk. My colleagues who were more experienced too, I watched them go through a lot of shock and surprise as well. I mean, typically you do start hearing some rumors and rumblings that, hey, this may be coming, and there was really none of that in this case.
Carrie:When there are rumblings like that, I guess kind of what I was thinking behind that question is, are there thoughts around NASA, like, okay, if this program gets canceled or reduced or whatever happens, kind of moving some of the people from that project to another one? Is there that reorganization thought or do you really have to step back and start over and just reapply to what's available?
Christie:Yeah, I think we've gotten a little more robust in planning for things like that. The what ifs. When we do our resource planning, knowing that there's always, even if it's not a major program cancellation, right? We have schedule slips. It's just the nature of our business in developing spacecraft that are super complicated. You start with pretty aggressive schedules to try to make progress as quickly as you can. But there are surprises along the way. Things you learn, things that have to be redesigned or retested, fly another test flight. And so we aren't always flying the missions when we thought we would, based on our five year budget planning cycles.
Carrie:So for you, how did you approach that when that happened? Were you kind of frantically trying to apply to other things or just reaching out to your network? Or how did you move from that to your next thing?
Christie:Yeah, I kind of felt this sense of urgency to take control of what I could. There was no reversing that decision. There was no right, looking back, but I also was not going to be happy just sitting around waiting to see what was going to happen. I started again. I mentioned our small team. We didn't have the remaining space shuttle flights to keep us busy. So we really just kind of started some brainstorming efforts on what we could do that was productive and helpful while we waited to see where we were gonna be headed. So things like, I mentioned how much progress we had made with some of the designs and things really. We did a lot of knowledge capture, because we were hopeful that NASA would decide to go back to the moon again at some point, and hopefully in our careers. And so really making sure we captured all that documentation, so that it could be picked up and used again in the future. Helped our shuttle colleagues with the same kind of thing, like capturing all of those lessons learned, especially from operating a vehicle, for multi-decade. What would you do different next time? What were some of the kind of hard lessons that maybe we don't wanna relearn in the future? And capturing those kinds of things too.
Carrie:When they said the program was canceled, was that immediate or was it future dated or how did that work?
Christie:In human space flight timelines, it was fairly immediate. I mean, it wasn't like that day, right. But by the end of the fiscal year, we were supposed to be kind of ramping down and turning things off. I might be remembering the timeline a little vaguely, but yeah, it was fairly quick. But looking back now, there are so many pieces of what got canceled and I'm putting air quotes here in my office, that really survived and actually are operating today. The initial shock and blow of the cancellation was really hard, but a lot of the elements, either continued or shifted maybe in a new way. But all the pieces are still there and it has become the Artemis program that I am working on with lots of other people in the agency and with our international partners and now commercial partners, which is kind of the new aspect that wasn't part of Constellation.
Carrie:So how did you transition from that to what you did next?
Christie:So I talked about some of the things we did to be protective and to help capture what we had learned. But I was kind of chomping at the bit to get back to something a little more operational. And so I started looking for other jobs in our organization and found an integration role, which, that term's used a lot across NASA. I found a position within the flight director office working on a new program called the Commercial Crew Program. I was their first program integrator to help follow what that program was doing, making sure operations and crew perspectives were being considered as they were starting off on this first commercial program where we were gonna have companies actually building and operating a spacecraft that our NASA crew was gonna fly on.
Carrie:How were some of the goals of that program different from programs in the past?
Christie:It was a pretty drastic shift. We had a precursor to that that was actually part of the ISS program called the Cargo Resupply. It wasn't a program, it was within ISS, but cargo resupply services. And this was really driven, again, kind of by politics, but it has been such a positive shift in my mind. It was a little scary at first for NASA to think about handing over the keys to commercial companies to actually Yeah. Own and operate spacecraft that is gonna be interfacing with NASA owned spacecraft. The commercial cargo office within ISS really paved the way on that model and proved that it could work.
Carrie:So what was your role on that team and what kinds of things were you working on?
Christie:Yeah, so when commercial crew stood up, with any new program, and especially when you are putting out a procurement, it's all about defining what the NASA requirements are going to be. We have a broad team of engineers and experts within NASA that come together with their various areas of expertise to define what the requirements are. And from the operations team, we really bring that operational perspective. So we know that requirements are there to drive what capabilities you need, but then the operations teams takes those vehicle capabilities and figures out how to efficiently and effectively operate a spacecraft. It's really important, and I think NASA's gotten really good at including the ops team early on so that we can help influence things that we've learned along the way and make sure we don't design things that maybe cause a lot of work in real time operations, are overly constraining or are maybe not effective for efficient astronaut operations in space.
Carrie:So we did mention at the beginning of the episode that you do have a graduate certificate in project management. So where did that piece come in? Cuz a lot of what you just said really sounds like you're utilizing a lot of those kind of skills and it seems like it's been a thread through a lot of this. I think students hear project management a lot when people talk about their career paths or the types of roles that they have. So can you help define that for us and tell us about the decision you made to get that and how that has fit into your career path?
Christie:Yes. I actually pursued that right around the time I talked about the Constellation program being canceled. Johnson Space Center had started a new development program that was offered to civil servants, and it was called the Project Leadership Program. And it was a two year program where you didn't go off full time, but it was a part-time deal and it was folks around the center of the different institutional organizations and programs applied. I got selected to be one of the operations candidates for the program. And it was wonderful. It was kind of a combination of academics and projects. We took coursework through, they actually brought in instructors from Stevens Institute of Technology. They would come to Houston and teach us the coursework that they do in their graduate program. So it was really great to do that with a full class of other NASA people. Right. So we're learning the academic pieces of project management, of systems engineering and integration, but it's a room full of people that work in human space flight. And so we could directly have discussions, talk examples of things we've dealt with before. So it was a really powerful way to learn about project management with a group of leaders that have a lot of experience in our field.
Carrie:So for students who are thinking about project management or who have heard project management, can you talk about some of the skills or perhaps some of the strategies, like kind of the bigger picture things that you learn within a project management program, that maybe aren't industry specific necessarily, but that are really beneficial for someone in their career path?
Christie:Yeah. So for me it was all pretty new because the work I had been doing was kind of leveraging well organized projects and programs, but I wasn't directly in the project management or program management roles yet. But I'd had enough experience to really kind of latch onto why the project management skills and processes and just the vernacular too, right? Like understanding what it really means to build requirements or what a Gantt chart is and how a schedule works. Just those things that I use the end product so far, but now I'm really understanding how all of that gets built and helps manage a project or a program.
Carrie:Are there certain types of people or certain types of personalities that click really well with project management that you've noticed?
Christie:Oh, that's a good question. I think there are certain people that definitely just have a knack for it. Super organized, like to fit puzzle pieces together. But you also have to, I think some of the best project and program managers are really good people persons too. That's the term. Because your program management, the way you apply it, only goes so far on paper, right? It's really about understanding the work and understanding that people are doing the work and what they need and what you need from them. And you can't get that without building a really good relationship and understanding of all of the players on your team. So I think that's something to definitely consider. There's people at NASA that are just like the best budget people, like they understand budgets, the ins and outs. In my job now, like I rely so heavily on those folks, they're like spreadsheet wizards. The things they can do in Excel just kind of blow my mind and I use it on a daily basis. But I don't have the skillset to go figure that out on my own. It's just not my forte. When I was working Constellation, one of the assignments I had was, it was kind of a novel idea that my group lead had had about how we, in the future of flight control operations, how can we better manage complex operational constraints, because they really spread across all of the products that we own. It's all dependent on the design and the testing and what we learn about what the vehicle can do, and then what constraints we put upon ourselves. And then those things show up on the data displays we're looking at, or a procedure we're executing. All of that to say, he handed me this project in infancy and said, Hey, take this and see what you can do with it. And it was basically to build a new software tool to help manage and integrate constraints across all of our operational products. And I was working with a really talented software development team at a different NASA center. So that was kind of my first experience of doing cross center work, which was really exciting. It was a really small project, but I had to figure out what our cost was gonna be, what our schedule was gonna be, what our requirements were gonna be, what all of our stakeholder expectations were gonna be. So I'd had just a really small project to kind of start getting that experience. And that's when the project leadership program kind of came out as an opportunity and I thought, oh, I could really use some more academic background on this stuff to help. So that was kind of probably what attracted to me most as I was already kind of starting to do that and did feel a little in over my head as far as all of the technical cost schedule management associated with it.
Carrie:Well, and that's a great thing to point out too, for people to be aware of as they move through their careers. There's so many professional development and education opportunities out there, whether it's like formal education at a university or through the corporation or company or organization you work for, or perhaps it's like a national professional organization, right? That has conferences and workshops and things. There's so many opportunities out there to get a skill or learn more about something that you're working on that you can put on your resume that you did, right? Because people like to see that the people they're interviewing or they're hiring or they're working with are seeking to better themselves and contribute to the work that they're doing. And it's important to look around and take note of that and notice those opportunities and how that can really help you.
Christie:Absolutely. I don't think there's an industry or a company out there that doesn't utilize project management skills, so it definitely a good thing to dive into at the right point, depending on what you wanna do.
Carrie:You mentioned before that that five year job you had in the beginning was like the longest one that you probably had. So there's a lot of different positions we could talk about here, but can you kind of just tell us how you were moving between these positions, to get you into the type of the role that you are in today?
Christie:Sure. Sometimes my next move just wasn't something in the plan but popped up. Once Constellation was canceled, I think I would've stayed with that team for quite some time. But others were very intentional. Once I was working in the flight director office, I was starting to think about my next move and I really was interested in kind of pursuing more of a management path. So I started looking at, at NASA it's called a group lead. It's kind of that first layer of leading a team formally, not at the supervisor level quite yet, but you're kind of that first layer of organizing a team and being in charge. I actually, the first one I applied for, I did not get, which was disappointing. But, I think it all worked out for the best. And then the next opportunity that came up, I interviewed for that one and I was selected. So I moved into my first kind of formal leadership role. Definitely had learned a lot of leadership skills along the way, but was able to put them to use for the first time in more of a formal capacity. Yeah.
Carrie:So can you tell us a little bit about the type of role that you have now and what you're doing?
Christie:Sure. So my management jobs have progressed since then. I had moved up to become a branch chief, did some other integration roles in between the two. Including in the astronaut office, which was a really fun time. But then we went through an organization while I was in the astronaut office and it opened up a new division, with a new structure that had a branch chief job opening. And so I applied for that, as kind of that next step up in management. And was selected for that. And it was kind of a perfect fit cuz it was all these piece parts of program integration work that I had done before. And so it just felt like absolutely the right thing. It was interesting cause I wasn't necessarily looking to be a branch chief at that point. But when that particular position opened up, it just seemed like absolutely the right fit for me at that point. So I moved into that. It was really exciting. I was able to kind of help formulate what the new organization was gonna look like and stand up our new teams. So not long after I got the branch chief position. Actually, we had a pretty major family opportunity crop up for my husband with a job in Denver. And so that was, a surprise as far as timing. You know, we'd kind of always dreamed of maybe someday living closer to the mountains, especially after getting spoiled in Munich, Germany, living near the Alps. Oh yeah, yeah. We really loved that. But it was kind of always, oh yeah, maybe what if someday, kind of thing. And then all of a sudden there was this opportunity and it was terrible timing for me. It was, I had just gotten this big promotion. I was standing up my team. I felt so much ownership and responsibility and I really had a hard time working through that. But ultimately, we'd had a daughter, a couple years before and it just felt like, I had to think about professional versus family and what's the priority and what's the right thing for us. And ultimately we decided to move to Colorado.
Carrie:Yeah. Well, and that's such a great point to make because, you know, even in the context, we're talking very much about career in this conversation, but you know, obviously life is another piece of this, where you have to consider your location, your family, your life situation. Sometimes other things happen, whether it's like a medical situation or something else happens within your family, or even in a community where you want to exit a community or go toward a different community for some reason. But there's so many factors to take in when you're making these big decisions and that that's life. That's how it really is. And so sometimes there's different seasons of life where we have to potentially make different decisions than we otherwise would if we were just laser focused only on our career path.
Christie:Yeah, I that's absolutely true. And the other thing is, you know, I think we all sometimes get into a situation where we think, oh, it's just not the right time. You know, it's just not the right time. Yeah. I see a lot of the folks that I mentor kind of struggle with that just with like applying for other jobs or, you know, it's not the right time. It's not the right time because I need to finish this or I need to see this through and that is all valid. But it's also true that you have to recognize sometimes there's never gonna be a good time. Right. Right, right. You know, so that's ultimately what pushed me to just say, okay, yeah, I just got this great new job that I love and I love my team. I can stay another year, but, you know, what's that gonna do? Right? Ultimately decided to just push forward and do what we thought was best for our family. It was interesting because I assumed I was quitting NASA. That's one of the reasons we were comfortable with moving, you know, the greater Denver areas where we are. There's a huge amount of airspace industry out here. I had known a lot of people that had left Johnson Space Center and moved out here. So I felt like there would be opportunities for me. It was very scary to think about leaving NASA, but I was willing to give it a try. So I went into my boss's office and I'll be honest, like I just kind of broke down and she thought something really tragic had happened and was very concerned. And I said, we're moving to Denver. Her immediate response was, don't quit yet. Like, just, it's okay. Get out there and we'll see. We'll help you transition. Which, I mean, what a gift that is, right? Like, yeah. To have that kind of support. That could go a lot of different ways. But I've always been very fortunate with having such a supportive management team. What that looked like for me. Again, I had become a supervisor, obviously you can't supervise, or at least back before pandemic days. Right, right. That wasn't a thing. I had to step down from my branch chief role, but I moved out here and they gave me a lot of self-guided project work to do on my own. Which was actually kind of a refreshing change. I was doing a little bit of liaison work with one of the big aerospace firms out here that we were working with on our Orion program. And so I was going down to that facility a couple times a week and working with them. Which was nice to kind of get me out of the house cuz I was not used to working from home. And then I was doing this other project kind back on the commercial crew program. It was time to start formulating what our launch and landing operations were gonna look like since it had been a really long time since we weren't launching humans from Florida and returning them on a runway on a space shuttle. So, they gave me some really great work, to get started while I was out here, while I kind of figured out what my next step was gonna be.
Carrie:Yeah. So would you say your work is more focused on project management? I mean, are you doing a lot of engineer kind of calculations and figuring things out or what it like the type of work that you're actually doing? How would you kind of categorize what you're doing?
Christie:Yeah. I'm not doing a lot of engineering work these days. I'll say a couple years ago I started a new position, one of our new Artemis programs, the Human Landing System, which is another commercial program. So we're having commercial partners, design, build, fly and operate their own spacecraft that are gonna land the next people on the moon. So that's what I'm doing. I am the deputy manager of our Lander Flight Operations team. And I utilize a lot of project management skills, for sure because I manage an office which has a budget, which has a schedule, which has a lot of technical requirements that we own and manage, both within our own team, as well as the contractor that we have insight into their operations team. So, I'm not fully doing project management every day. I do a lot of technical reviews and things as well. But definitely leveraging a lot of what I've learned previously in my new program job.
Carrie:So for students listening who have a real interest in the type of career path that you've had, we've talked about a lot of different types of roles and different types of opportunities that you've had. I mean, aerospace engineering is an obvious program choice that people could look at. Are there other degrees too that you would recommend, or would you really focus on an aerospace engineering background for students who have this dream of this goal of working in a NASA kind of environment?
Christie:Yeah, kind of. As I mentioned earlier, I don't think aerospace engineering is absolutely critical if you wanna work at NASA, right? Yeah. I think about who I work with on a day-to-day basis. Our operations team works really closely with our health and medical team who help take care of the astronauts from a medical perspective. Oh, wow. So we have medical doctors, we have science teams who develop all of the experiments and help the astronauts conduct science in space. There's just so many aspects. We have lawyers who help us work through procurements and I mentioned budget analysts as well. A financial background. I mean, there's all sorts of ways you can contribute to the NASA mission. So what I always tell people, and this is what all of my predecessors I hear, say all the time is their best advice is find something that you're really passionate about, right? And something that you're good at. But, in my mind, like I'm not the world's best engineer. I don't actually do a whole lot of technical engineering, since I got outta school. However, I'm so passionate about it and I learned what I needed to, and I found kind of this niche in operations that works really well for me. I just feel like that is a really good thing to keep in mind when you're pursuing a career, is make sure it's something that gets you excited, that you believe in the mission, you believe in the vision, whether it's a company or whatever you're looking for.
Carrie:Yeah, there is a lot of public discourse about NASA and space exploration, particularly with the amount of money that it costs, right. To do all these missions. Like when you think about the overall mission that you're contributing to and what motivates you to do this work and what got you to be passionate about this work in the first place. When you hear those kind of comments in the media, or perhaps you just hear'em in, you know, people just having conversations on the street. What is your general response to that and how do you counter that argument and what is your belief in that?
Christie:To me, human space flight is just one modern example of just our innate human nature of wanting to explore, right? We wouldn't all be living in the United States of America if there weren't human exploration, right? Yeah. This desire to go places you've never been before and see what's there and see what you can learn. So to me that's kind of fundamentally what drives me and what I think is so exciting about space. And then on top of that, the technical challenges, the complexities of what it really takes to put humans in space. This dangerous place that we're not really supposed to be able to exist in, but we found a way to make it work. And then what we can learn when we do that. The moon program specifically Moon to Mars. Cuz that's our ultimate goal is the send humans to Mars. Like, it's really ultimately all about just learning and broadening our perspective for humanity. We learn a lot about our own planet from leaving it. That's one of our core tenets is earth science. Yes, our budgets look big, but it's actually pretty tiny when you compare it to some of the other major pieces of the federal government's budget. I think it just brings a lot of spinoffs, from a technology perspective, it brings knowledge. I was just on vacation a couple days ago at a national park with my family, and they were doing an astronomy day, and they had a lecture from the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the scientists that contributed to that. And he talked about everything we've learned just in the one year that it's been operating or, so I think I've got that right. Yeah. It's amazing. And the things we're gonna learn about what's beyond just from that. It was a very it expensive program to get off the ground, but it's amazing and it's going to be teaching us things for probably decades to come. And it's so exciting. So to me, it's worth the investment. It also just from a national priorities perspective, it keeps us kind of on the cutting edge of technology, which helps us, as one of the main leaders of the world.
Carrie:As you've gone through your career, and as you've learned about what's out there, so to speak, and as you've seen a lot of these technological advances, has it changed your perspective just as being a human being a human being and, and life in general? Has your perspective changed, just kind of big picture as you've gone along in your career in this industry?
Christie:Oh, that's a heavy question.
Carrie:That's kind of what I think about is regardless of what industry you're in, I think a lot of us, our perspective of our role in life and like how maybe even an opinion we had about something in particular changes because we've experienced things through a different lens than what we knew before. Right. And as we learn more and looking through that lens, it can change even how we approach things in our lives. NASA's kind of almost this kind of fantasy lens of that, right? Because a lot of people thinking about space is this obviously huge thing, but even just literally our perspective of earth and being a human is different. So I didn't know how that has impacted you over time.
Christie:Yeah. I think being in it, it continually boggles my mind what we can accomplish. Right. And to be part of that is just a dream come true. I mean, the International Space Station, I think is just one of the most amazing things humans ever done. And I'm not just talking about the technological, but I'll start there. Right. I mean, we've had Yeah. Humans living. I, so I started in the summer of 2000, and by November we had our first crew up there, and we have never not had humans in space since November 1st, 2000. And who would've thought Right, that we would've been that successful with this program? Beyond that, that's not even the biggest accomplishment, the international partnership it took to make that happen has been astounding. And it's actually playing out now with Artemis where we have a really cool agreement called the Artemis Accords that NASA started and is basically open to any country in the world that wants to come be part of this peaceful pursuit of exploring the moon and Mars together. Because we've learned through ISS that that international partnership makes us stronger, it makes it harder for one country to just back out and say, we're not doing this anymore. We have been able to navigate that through some pretty tumultuous political times, even with some of our international partners, right? And we are able to put that aside and focus on the mission and be really successful and demonstrate that we can work together peacefully on a pursuit like that. So, yeah, it definitely changes my perspective. It continues to amaze me what we're able to accomplish. It's what's kept me here is I just wanna continue to be part of that.
Carrie:Yeah. Which is really like the dream regardless of what industry it is, right? That you wanna be part of the thing that you're part of.
Christie:Yes, indeed.
Carrie:So, looking back over your journey, do you have any big picture advice for students, whether they want to go into the same industry you've been into, or even just general advice about progressing through your career or taking advantage of your time in college, and trying to figure out what it is you'd like to do?
Christie:I talked earlier about picking something you're passionate about, but throughout, whatever path you pursue, keeping it interesting, keeping it exciting, whatever you can do for yourself to make the most out of it. And for me, I talked about starting my NAS career in college, but actually the summer after my freshman year. I got a job at an airport, a small airport near where I grew up. And I worked line service just to be around airplanes, I and to get my pilot's license. So I got this job. I learned how to marshal in the little airplanes and drug the fuel truck and fuel'em up and wipe the bugs off the leading edge and that kinda thing. So it was, oh wow. You know, not a glamorous job, but I learned so much about airplanes that summer. I got half off flying lessons for working there and was able to fly enough hours to almost finish my license. And that, just kind of stoked the flame of getting more passionate and more into my career path. Because it was a little early for me to actually get like an aerospace internship. I did that the following summer. But it's funny because when I interviewed down in Houston for my first job, I had five interviews, but the one I ended up taking the gentleman who interviewed me, All he wanted to talk about on my resume was my summer doing line service. He was not interested in the research projects I had done at NASA or even some of the other, like back at school, projects I'd done as at university. He wanted to hear all about working on airplanes. And it's because I talked about the maintenance skills, that I had to teach astronauts. It showed that I had some kind of hands-on experience. Oh yeah. And under with hardware, right? And so it was directly applicable. I would've never envisioned that was what I'd be talking about for my NASA interview, but that's what we were talking about. So you just never know. So go after some of the experiences that are just exciting to you and you'll be surprised how they could apply to future career opportunities.
Carrie:Yeah. That's such great advice. Absolutely. Christie, thank you so much for joining us today. It's just been really fun to hear your story, and I know that there's a lot of people out there who really have an interest in this industry. So hearing about all these different types of opportunities you've had along your path, I hope that it's opened some people's minds to all the different kinds of roles that they can be thinking about and perhaps ways that they can start researching and getting started in that direction. So thank you so much for sharing that with us.
Christie:Yes, thank you so much for having me. It was fun to think back on how I got to where I am today, so I really appreciate it.
Carrie:Yeah, thank you.
Do you know someone christie.bertels@googlemail.com I should interview? Please DM me on Instagram@pathsinprogresspodcast and let me know who I should talk to. I would love to hear about how these stories are impacting your journey. Please follow Paths in Progress wherever you download your podcasts and leave a review to let me know what you think. You can also follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn at Paths in Progress Podcast. Our music is by John Grimmett and the artwork is by Edgar Alanis. Thanks again for joining me today.