 Purdue Aeronautics and Astronautics prepared me for my career by teaching me how to think and how to approach problems. They taught me how to break down a problem to arrive at a solution or variety of solutions and that has served me well over my career. I knew that I wanted to be an engineer at the age of five when the Challenger tragedy occurred. I remember sitting in my kindergarten class and watching the Challenger events unfold and it wasn't so much what happened with Challenger but everything leading up to that. I remember thinking wow that is so so cool that a teacher is going into space. I remember thinking it's so cool that this is a profession that people go into and it was then and then after the tragedy seeing the community rally around the space program and and work to make it right is what really wanted made me want to go into aeronautics and astronautics. Some of the highlights for me within the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics were taking Arrow 418 and being able to fly on board the Vomit Comet aka the weightless wonder best weight loss program ever. It was just an amazing experience from everything the learning and putting together the experiment, learning how to formulate an experiment and then going and creating it the hands-on nature of building it designing it and then getting to go fly it and have that experience of you know let's pretend I'm an astronaut and really understand how that environment impacts what you're working on gives you a whole new appreciation for when they say you're in a zero gravity environment and that was just an amazing experience for me that I've carried with me and throughout my career. Professors that really stuck out to me were working with Professor Colicott in the Arrow 418 program and the zero gravity experiments you know his dedication helping you work through the problem being able to help you with the solution and then coming down with us as we flew the experiments that was you know really great experience other professors such as Professor Crosley who helped me with my thesis and then was it was an advisor for my thesis. I can't say enough how much I appreciate that that time and dedication to help me reach my goals. Organizations that I was involved with while I was at Purdue included ASEC, the Arrow Astro Engineering Student Council. I was involved in AIAA and I was involved in SEDS and Purdue Fall Space Day. I liked giving back to the community in terms of outreach and paying it forward to inspire the next generation. While I was at Purdue I was given the opportunity to have an internship at Boeing which really helped prepare me for my career because I was able to understand what it was like to be an industry and how to apply what I learned in the classroom to what it was like in an actual industry office setting and how you know what were the differences between what you learned in the classroom versus how you apply that in real life and those differences and understanding those differences prepared me for my last year at Purdue and how I approached different problems and what I took away from different learning experiences and that process and that kind of internal transformation continued on throughout my career as I learned different experiences and I'm able to adapt and learn from that from one one job assignment to the next. The advice I would give to current and future Purdue students would be to take the opportunity to learn, embrace the experience, make friends. Those friends that you make, the friends that you spend hours in the evening with and their wee hours of the morning getting homework assignments done those those friends will be with you throughout your career. They will be the beginning of your network and they will they will be the ones that you call and say hey let me bounce an idea off of you. You know really take the time to to get to know the folks around you and then really also take the time to push your limits and get comfortable being uncomfortable because if you do that you will never stop learning and you will go far in your career. The first small step in my career was the first time I flew an airplane when I was 12 years old. The second small step in my career was taking that first flight even further when I went to the Culver Academies where I had a scholarship and learned how to fly an airplane got my private pilot's license. The next small step was attending Purdue and getting my outstanding education in Purdue aeronautics and astronautics and then my giant leap was when I became a program manager and my first assignment was to deliver spacecraft to our customer clean sheet design to delivery within 13 months. Backed by an amazing team we pulled it off and that was my giant leap that opened the door to all sorts of career opportunities. My name is Kimberly Hicks. I got my degree my bachelor's degree in aeronautics and astronautics in 2006 my master's degree in engineering in 2013. I am a Purdue engineer.