Throughout the week, activities took place in all settings, from early childhood to adulthood, to bring Hooked on to School Days to life and, by the same token, inspire pupils and students in their academic journey.
On Thursday, college and university students were able to attend an exclusive conference by Farah Alibay, an aerospace engineer part of the Mars 2020 mission.
This is the first time that the activities of the Journées de la perseverance have also been aimed at higher education, a request that has been made for several years.
The engineer who grew up in Joliette shared the experiences that dotted her journey until her job at NASA.
“Not having a role model in engineering slowed me down at first. When we see people who look like us in areas, it allows us to dream. Faced with my failures, it gave me a lot of hope when I thought that women like me had succeeded, “said the one who remembers being fascinated by the work of the engineers in the film. Apollo 13.
Over the years, she found role models that encouraged her to pursue aerospace engineering. And people supported her and pushed her to excel, including a college professor in England who encouraged her to enroll at the University of Cambridge.
“He said to me, ‘You’ll never know if you don’t try.’ In life, I tend to limit myself, to tell myself that there is someone better than me for a job. I was afraid to push myself and apply to a university where it would be difficult. I was afraid that someone would tell me no. This sentence, it changed my mentality. This sentence accompanies me in my career. »
“But it wasn’t easy. I almost let go. It was in my freshman year of college. I had failed everything in my first semester. It was horrible. I did not understand anything. I wondered what I was doing there: no one looked like me and no one had the same life experience as me. The big reason I stayed was because I had a dream. I told myself that I would stay at least until June, but that I would do everything to succeed. I asked for help,” she says.
Thanks to her efforts and her perseverance, she found herself ninth out of nearly 300 students for her results at the end of the school year. She then crossed the ocean to do her doctorate in aerospace at MIT in Boston.
We know the rest. She joined NASA where she recently worked on the Mars 2020 mission. She had the opportunity to pilot the rover Curiosity on the red planet and fly the helicopter Ingenuity. Farah Alibay has just joined the SPHEREx mission, which concerns a telescope that studies the universe in infrared. “The telescope will give us different information about what is happening in the universe and it will help us understand the origins of the universe, where the water comes from, how galaxies are formed. I work with people as passionate as me. I love contributing to something bigger than myself. »
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