00:00I used to spend nights, you know, lying awake, trying to imagine the stars.
00:04I just thought it was really cool to try to really feel your place in the universe.
00:14I am Tracy Drain, a systems engineer here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
00:19I started off as a child really interested in math and science.
00:23I wanted to do something in the space program.
00:27My mom, she always told me that I could do anything.
00:30She got that from her mother.
00:32When she needed something done around the house, she didn't just sit around waiting for her husband to come home.
00:37She taught her daughters in that small, everyday way, you should just get out and do stuff for yourself.
00:42Throughout my time in grad school, you got sometimes a little bit of a sense from people that they thought
00:48differently about women in the field.
00:50I think it's great that people are trying to expose stories like Katherine Johnson.
00:56She was born in 1918 and lived in an area where black kids didn't even have an opportunity to really
01:04study past the eighth grade.
01:05She was so precocious and her parents so appreciated that they really moved mountains in order to make it possible
01:13for her to continue her education.
01:15She was definitely going first and showing the doubters that women and people of color could do this kind of
01:22work.
01:23It's clear to me that her work made it possible to continue bringing women and people of color into these
01:29kinds of fields.
01:30So, yeah, absolute trailblazer.
01:37Thank you.
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