Wanda Thomas

The first thing that popped in my mind was my mother. I feel so sorry for her, I feel so pained for her too. I think she was robbed. My mother graduated from Tuskegee in 63, I was born in 64. According to her, she was number 5 of 9 children, the first one to go to college. Her father was a sharecropping farmer down here in Alabama. She was a little girl out of college when a married man several years her senior with a daughter and a wife impregnated her right out of college, after her parents had scrimped and scratched to put her through Tuskegee. I know I was not easy to raise - I was mostly an honors student and graduated high school with honors, but I was far from perfect. I got pregnant when I was 16 and had an abortion when I was 17. I know I was tough on her, I know it was hard, she was a single mother. But she raised me, and despite everything she went through, she made my success possible.

When I first left the academy and went to Albany, Georgia, I had an instructor, Paul Murray, who was a former military person. He was extremely thorough in his training - he would pull out one, two, three more pages and keep writing his response with detailed explanations and references I should refer to in order to improve my outcome. I really appreciated him because I like school, I'm kind of a student at heart. He told me he worked with some women in the military who would try to emulate men. He said, don't do that. He said, remain who you are. Be a lady. At that time, we were required to dress up to go to work, so most of the time I would have my skirts on, my dresses, and my pumps and stockings. Air traffic was hugely dominated by men when I was there, and I loved that. But it felt good to be validated professionally and respectfully as a woman. Paul's advice to remain who I am and be a lady while working in a male-dominated field really stuck with me.

I'm thinking, keep to yourself - though my social life was a big part of it. I can say vaguely, remember your value. Think about how you want to look at yourself when you remember yourself 20 years or 10 years from that point. Remember yourself as in - I know you have a lot of curiosity at that age, because basically you feel that when you step into a workplace, those people have it made, they know. But remember this: a lot of them have no clue as to some of the things you've experienced. One of the biggest stumbling blocks for me was attention from married men who were undisciplined in their commitment. So remember your value and think about how you want to see yourself years down the road.

Attention from married men who were undisciplined in their commitment - that was one of the biggest stumbling blocks I faced in my field.

Probably boundaries. If I say no to someone, or I say something, I don't really expect them to disrespect me on it. I have a hard time with that. Similar to talking to the people who did the work - when they've left things so raw, I have a hard time going back to them. Boundaries are really important to me in both my work and personal life.