Izzy House, M.S.

I attribute my success to an unwavering drive to make a difference in somebody else's life. It's what drives me when I'm tired, it's what drives me when I am distracted or not happy with something. And it really pinpoints on one specific moment. One of the cadets that I worked with at Civil Air Patrol, he never smiled. He was just a stoic kid. I just thought that was his personality, and he joined the Civil Air Patrol, and then I finally got him on a plane to have that experience, and he came off that plane with the most incredible, most beautiful smile I've ever seen in my life. It just lit up the sky. And he threw himself into Civil Air Patrol, learned how to be a leader, and really did well. And that winter, at our Christmas party, he read a letter to our squadron, and he told us that before that moment, he'd been considering suicide. And that's why he never smiled. And that Civil Air Patrol saved him. And ever since then, you know, no matter how small, that's what drives me all the time. It drives me to 15, 16-hour days, 7 days a week.

The best career advice I've ever received is to just keep at it. If you know that the direction that you need to go is a good direction, and it's got good stability, just keep at it, because it can be hard to make its way through. The second thing is network. The more specific the job, the more it will rely on someone you know to get you in. The space industry, it can be kind of hard to get into it if you don't know the right people. So persistence and networking would be the two things I would say were the most important about building your career.

Again, it's who you know. You will not meet them by staring at your phone at a networking event. Many people use the phone when they feel uncomfortable at a networking session. Make a rule to put it away. Target someone that looks as uncompfortable as you feel and say hello. Then try to meet as many people as conversation allows. Make sure that you develop that network and make sure that you're persistent in friendly follow-up. And just keep talking to people and keep networking, and make sure that you smile all the time. People like people that are friendly. (If they don't, you don't want them in your network) People want to work with people that they like. And you just make sure that when you smile, you smile full face and heart.

Right now, the space industry is just exploding. If you had asked me four months ago, last year was a really tough year for space. After the administration had a change, there was not a lot of demand signals for what to do, and then Jared Isaacman taking so long to be confirmed as NASA administrator, everybody was holding their breath. Now that that has happened, and there's all kinds of direction that is very clear from Jared Isaacman, space is actually exploding at the moment. That is the opportunity - that it's growing now, the floodgates have opened. The challenges within the industry is that even though it has been around for decades, it's still kind of a nascent industry. There's a lot of things that they hadn't figured out on how to run. You can go into maybe the fashion industry - it's been going on a long time, and there's certain ebb and flow to how they pull people into the industry, and how they change jobs, and the career paths, and all that. With space, it's a little different. They haven't got that funnel defined yet. So I think that is an opportunity there for different ways to have employment and workforce development. I think that can mature as time goes by.

Making an impact in somebody's life is the thing that drives me to do everything that I do. It doesn't matter whether it's with spaceports, or something local with communities. I envision those students, I envision their parents in my mind, and I think, what can give them excitement for life, and what can impact their career choices in life. And so that's what I do - I tend all those places that you can reach them.