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(Music)

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My first day of work

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was really exciting.  I was a little intimidated.  I was meeting a lot of people

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and seeing a lot of different things.  But it was also really, really exciting,

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because I knew that I was finally gonna actually be a part of this.

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The building that I work in is where a lot of really exciting things happen so I was seeing

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a lot of different facilities, and I remember being sore as I was walking around

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that first day, because my furniture hadn't arrived yet and I was sleeping on

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the floor of my apartment, but it was great.  I can't even describe it.

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Well, I actually have a bachelor's degree in theater and a lot of people are

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really surprised when they hear that, because they always want to know how I went from that

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transition of, you know, of studying something that's very creative to something that's more

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technical, but I think having that kind of creativity is very, very important.

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I mean, when you are working at some place like Goddard and you're

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constantly developing new ways of doing things, new ways of exploring things,

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you do have to be creative and that's something that I think can serve

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you well.  And so, if you are interested in things, you know like the arts, use

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it to your advantage.  When I was in school, I really wanted to build up

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a resume before I actually graduated and I went online and I came

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across an internship at Goddard and received it and came out here

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and I absolutely loved it.  It's an absolutely wonderful place to work.  It's

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so exciting to be around people that are so passionate about what they do.

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The environment is just absolutely beautiful and I knew I wanted to work

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here, and I went online around the time that I was graduating and they

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happened to be hiring in the optics and my emphasis was in optics.

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And we helped to actually build the hardware, align it, do

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that kind of work.  Test it at the subsystem component level.

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And my job is really interesting, because I do different things

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each day.  Sometimes I am in the lab taking data or looking

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at data.  Sometimes I go to meetings and talk about the data.

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It's really exciting and to me, you know,

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trying a new metrology technique and analyzing data,

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having it show that it works, is just the most exciting thing

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in the world to me.  And it's so amazing to be able to go in and show it to the rest of

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the people and say - Look, you know what we were going to do, it worked - and we

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have this data to show it.  There's no comparison to that.  I just absolutely

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love it.  One of the things that I find the most challenging about my job is

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no matter how hard I plan or how hard I try there are always things that

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are outside of my control.  We'll be in the middle of building an instrument

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and a piece of equipment will break, and we need to fix it and kind of rearrange

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our schedule to accommodate it, explain to people what went wrong,

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how we're planning on fixing it, and so it's really caused me to kind of

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not be so rigid and have to be able to go with that flexibility, because I'm the kind of

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person who needs to know at every moment exactly what I'm doing.  And when I'm thrown

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for a loop like that, you know you just have to be able to recover from it

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immediately to keep things going.  I'm proud of the fact that in my

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job I won't compromise what I believe is the right thing.

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At the end of the day I don't really feel that I answer to

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any project manager or center director.  I answer to my conscience

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and I answer to the tax payers of this country, because they are the ones who allow us

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to do what we do and it's important to me that we give them something that's meaningful to them.