Carol Erikson

I attribute my success to several things. Part of it is hard work and dedication, and passion. I was lucky enough to find a career that I was very passionate about. My son actually asked me this recently, why I was working so hard, and I told him it was because I didn't think of work as work - I loved what I was doing. So being passionate about what I was doing and loving it enabled me to dedicate fully to my career and personal development. I was blessed with intelligence and the ability to both look at the big picture and dive deeply into specific topics when needed so that's certainly helped me throughout my career. I have also been a continuous learner. I have honestly learned something new every day on the job throughout my career and I pursued formal education including a bachelor's and master's degree in engineering and Executive Education programs at UCLA and Harvard. I was also lucky to work with very strong leaders, mentors, advocates, and peers. The people that I worked for and worked with pushed me to continuously learn and grow throughout my career. And last but not least, the ability to collaborate and get along well with others of very diverse teams and very diverse people, I think that's been kind of a consistent theme. Even going back to my high school years, and all the way through to today, I get along very well on teams and work well with a lot of diverse people, and it has been the power of these teams that have really propelled my success.

A previous boss of mine used to talk about work-life balance being like a seesaw. On a seesaw, you have to be able to balance, go back and forth. Her example was you're going back and forth between work priorities and life priorities, and in different situations, one might have to take priority over the other, and you need to spend more time in one place than the other. But over the course of time, if you spend too much time on one or the other, you will leave the other one hanging, and it's not going to work out in the long run. I always thought that was a great example, and really important words to live by.

I also had a previous mentor who gave me great advice when considering a new opportunity. Look at the people who have done that role in the past and ask where are they now? Also, look at the people that you will be working with in this role and ask where they will be five years from now. Both of these questions provide a great perspective on how this role may impact your future career path.

First, follow your passions and be prepared for your passions to change over time. Secondly, be that continuous learner, especially if you are working in technology fields that are so rapidly changing. Whether you're learning on the job, or through formal education, or through things you do for fun outside of work, it's really important to always be pushing yourself and learning new things, new developing new capabilities.

In the space industry, it's a time of explosive growth. There's a need, a demand from our nation to really develop systems faster, more affordably, and more effectively than ever before. So, it's driving a lot of change in the industry, a lot of demands to do things differently, to produce systems more quickly, to leverage capabilities like AI. In the past, there were career opportunities with just a few companies, now it's much broader, and it's not just our nation, too. It's really a much broader worldwide set of opportunities for people. We recognize we need to have more capabilities in space to help protect our nation and protect our allies. But there's also the commitment both from our government and from commercial leaders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to ultimately get us back to the moon and to Mars. All of that focus is just creating a lot more opportunities across the industry within the United States and worldwide.

The values most important to me in both my work life and home life are faith, trust, integrity, hard work, dedication, and following through on commitments. These values guide everything I do, both professionally and personally.