Corrie Lamkin

When I was in college during my undergrad, I had a really, really bad couple of weeks where I was struggling in a couple of classes. I think I failed 3 tests and got them back all on the same day. My mother told me that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you graduate with a 4.0 or with a 2.0, you're still gonna graduate as an aerospace engineer. It really allowed me to take a super deep breath, because you're right, at the end of the day, I can kick myself over this, or I can just get back to work and do better next time. And sure enough, that's what I did. That's probably the best advice that I ever had in regards to work and school and goals. I was one of those people who really beat myself up about my grades because I knew what I wanted to do from such a young age and I knew that I had to be good at math even though it's my worst subject. So just that ability to take a deep breath and recognize that it's gonna be okay, I'm still gonna accomplish my dreams, even if it's not perfect.

I give that exact same advice. I get a lot of people, because I really like to talk to newer engineers or people who are in school or even just people who are thinking about going to college and focusing on engineering. I get a lot of the 'well, math isn't my best subject, so I don't know if this is a good fit, even though I'm really into it.' Math was my worst subject. I just really, really wanted it. My dream is to be the first person on Mars one day. I'm not sure that it'll happen, but it's still my dream, and I wanted it so bad that I turned my worst subject into an asset. I don't know that it ever became my best subject, but I learned to enjoy it enough that I got good at it. So just keep doing that.

The challenges are that it's almost oversaturated. There's a lot of startups, there's a lot of companies that are just starting that are doing different things, and choosing what you want to focus on is a challenge because there's so much out there, which is really exciting. And that's also one of the biggest opportunities. Space has become more accessible than it ever has been before. Not necessarily for people quite yet, though it's getting there, but at least for universities and for other companies to start putting up stuff into space. It makes it a really exciting time to be part of the aerospace industry because there's so much you can do. You don't have to work for NASA or for Boeing. You can work for these small startup companies and still be able to see your hardware in space one day. It used to be that when you worked at NASA or you worked at a big prime, you might never, ever see hardware up in space that you designed, whereas I started at my first small company and I had a satellite that I had designed from scratch up in space 18 months later.

As far as work goes, passion. I don't find it necessarily true that if you do a job you'll love, you'll never work a day in your life, because at the end of the day, eventually a job just becomes a job. But I think that you should be passionate about the job that you do. Thankfully, in the aerospace field, it's pretty uncommon that you find someone who's not a complete nerd about aerospace. Most of the people that I work with are really passionate about their job. And then, you know, just like everyone else, I'm just looking for integrity, both in life and in work. You want to make sure that the people that you're interacting with are who they say they are.