Authenticity and space history

Yesterday, I saw an article on LinkedIn, about the strangest interview question they had ever heard. The interviewer actually asked her, "How do I know you're not lying?"

Is that, actually, a thing people do? Lie, in a job interview? It doesn't seem like the route to a good career.

But I have to admit, when I was a Freshman looking for cooperative education opportunities, it felt like I had to prove why I went into Electrical Engineering, if I really was interested in Aerospace? For that matter, why Engineering and not, say, Astrophysics?

I've discussed my reasons in the past (I'll add trackback links later.)

With time on my hands, I've been reading and reflecting. That's also meant looking through old scrapbooks. In an era of "pics of it didn't happen," here's a handful of photos:

Resources about NASA culture

This is taking me longer than I wanted.  I have said that NASA's civil servant culture (from the Contractor position) has looked like one of the best places for women to work. That's actually one of the reasons I want to work there. So I'm going to start out with some general comments about organization culture from my management coursework, and then provide links to some of the literature and stories that already exist and/or are coming soon.

The culture of any organization is influenced by the structure, the corporate / institutional culture, the work-group culture, the geographically local surrounding culture, and customer and supplier culture.  All of these, together, create subtle differences in individual experience. Houston is different from Huntsville, Boeing is different from Lockheed Martin.

There is a precedence for former engineers who have become writers, speakers, including Homer Hickam himself. I am considering that path, as I've seen openings and opportunities to write... but I am not ready to give up on my technical career yet.

For today, I'm going to point to existing resources:

Discovering Space History

A few posts ago, I wrote about COMM 114, and how, when I researched my speeches, I discovered the world of space history: biographies, autobiographies, and so on and so forth.  I didn't stop reading when I had what I needed to present.  Even after my speeches were over, I looked through the stacks of HSSE to look for more, and when I returned to South Bend for the summer, I checked out the offerings at the St. Joseph County public library.

I had many reasons for studying space history.  Foremost on my mind was the common expression from George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  I made a promise to Challenger, that I would do what was within my power to prevent another tragedy.  If I'm going to do that, I have to understand where we came from.

Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes

Sorry this is late.  I drafted it late Wednesday night, then realized I wanted to sleep on it before posting.  Life is really busy, our spring concert is next week, the Annual Budget Drive is in full swing, and I'm trying to learn Python for the Natural Language Processing class.  I'm still *trying* to post on Monday-Wednesday-Friday.

Every student that graduates from Purdue is required to take Comm 114, a course on communication, speech, and working in groups.  As a required class, COM 114 draws from a larger pool of students than usual.  Most of my other classes were full of engineering students, or Spanish majors/minors.  But here I met a much wider variety of students than I had encountered so far.