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ALDA SIMPSON

My name is Alda Simpson (nee Darrah). I am currently the Associate Division Chief for the Engineering Services Division at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Our division includes the fabrication, assembly, and testing of space flight hardware. Our fabrication facilities include machining with state-of-the-art high tech computer-controlled machinery as well as conventional machinery, welding, plating, and composite materials development. We have many large clean rooms, including the largest of its type in the world, for assembling the flight hardware. The testing we do is to verify the spacebound hardware will survive launch and operate successfully in space environments. We do vibration testing, acoustic testing, acceleration testing, magnetic testing, electromagnetic interference testing and thermal vacuum testing. Our division has about 114 civil servants and 200 contractors working for us.

I am a mechanical engineer. When I was a young girl I was fascinated by the space program and wanted to be an astronaut. I wrote to President Kennedy and asked what I should do to prepare for a career in space, and someone from the White House wrote back and said, "Take engineering." And with that my mind was made up even though I didn't know what an engineer did. Fortunately for me, no one ever told me that engineering was a virtually all-male field at that time! Imagine my surprise at my first orientation class at Drexel University in Philadelphia to find I was the only woman there that day. It turned out in my freshman engineering class of about 500, there were 6 women. My parents had refused to pay for me to go college, and so I had been working after school and weekends all junior and senior years of high school to raise the money for freshman year in college. I think if I had not already paid that tuition I would have quit the first day. I'm certainly glad I did not!

Drexel University had been the only school to which I applied because of their cooperative engineering program. It is a five-year program. Freshman and senior year you spend nine months in school. The middle three years you spend six months at school and six months working in your field in industry. The salary I made the months I worked would then pay for the next year's tuition. In retrospect, another good aspect of the "co-op" program is that you get a realistic taste of engineering early on to see if you really like it. That way, it's early enough in your schooling to switch majors with minor loss of credit, and when you graduate you have over a year and a half of actual work experience. This both makes getting a job easier and gets higher starting salaries.

I did my co-op assignment with the Naval Air Engineering Center in Philadelphia designing test equipment for jet engines. As an aside I went to a small (69 in my gradating class) all-girl Catholic high school. I'm sure you can appreciate that a virtually all-male college and all-male work environment at a Navy ship yard made for quite a few cultural shocks and adjustments for both me and the men.

Because of bad knees and inadequate eyesight I had to give up my dream of being an astronaut, but as soon as I finished college I went to work for NASA at Goddard. I've been here since 1974. I started out in thermal testing, went to thermal design, then to contamination control, back to thermal testing then into management. I met my husband here at Goddard. Jerry was working in personnel but I met him in one of Goddard's many "extracurricular" clubs. We married in 1977 and have two daughters, Jeanine and Diana, who are now a senior and junior in high school. With me being an engineer and Jerry being a history major we thought we'd have very well-rounded children. In fact, we have one of each. Jeanine will be going to University of Tennessee next year to study to become a secondary education social studies teacher. Diana wants to go to Notre Dame and take engineering. I'd be glad to communicate with any young women interested in a career in engineering.

Archive of chats with Alda:

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