Her Story
About Sarah
I am a geologist by background and worked at Chevron for the better part of a decade. I discovered geology when I had to fulfill my science requirement in college and took Intro to Geology, and it stuck. Now I own a small consulting firm where we provide geologic engineering support for everything from full site restoration amendments to exploration in California. We're a company of four, and we're all moms and primary caregivers in our families who work from home. We all tried the full-time at the big company thing with having a balanced family with two working parents and careers that are very highly driven, and kids, but it's just not possible unless you have outside help. So we all took a step down to provide the role of parenting but didn't want to give up professionally, and we started our own company that allowed us to do so. Right now, we're very contract-dependent, so my goal for the next five years is to get to a place where we're very stable in our base and beginning to slightly grow.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sarah
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think there's definitely a large portion of where I've gotten to in life that has been privilege. I'm from a middle-class family, and my parents were able to pay for me to go to college, so right there I had the tools for success. But from that, I had mentors along the way. One thing I've realized, especially now having my own business, is it's okay to think outside of the box, and you can make your own path. It's not that it's easy to do so, but if you just have the skills in how to navigate the world, you can make it, and you can make it easily. Once you start to realize how things work, it's like staring at those paintings that look like a bunch of dots, but you stare at it long enough, you see the picture. Once you get to the point where you see the picture, you can't unsee it, and it becomes easy.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Know that you are worthy of a seat at the table, no matter your experience or what. Especially in a male-dominated industry, it's very easy to feel as the only woman in the room almost all the time that you don't belong there. So remember that you have an expertise that they don't have, which is being female. It took me four years to get over the imposter syndrome of having my own business and being comfortable. I've heard lots over my career of to get ahead, you basically have to emulate being a man, and I don't think that there's enough power in women that if we're allowed to utilize our skills, it has a different benefit that the men don't even realize yet. As the only females in most of these groups, it is amazing what we can accomplish just by getting them organized and communicating. I feel like that comes directly from being female and a mom and having that skill set to multitask and see what's the bigger picture. It's not my opinion, it's the goal of the group, the team, the project, so once we can set aside that, then we can actually move forward with something that's beneficial for everyone versus these ego trips that they tend to get stuck on.
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