JPL Engineer Gives Westride School’s Careers in STEM Lunchtime Talk

In the most recent installment of Westridge’s Upper School Careers in STEM lunchtime talks, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Systems Engineer Tracy Drain talked to a packed Fishroom audience of Upper School students about her professional life, personal journey to NASA, and the different jobs involved in space launches. (You can hear from Drain directly on the JPL website.)

Key lessons from Drain included: the importance of finding internal motivation; that students’ whole path through school doesn’t have to be perfect if they pick themselves up and clean up the situations (she got some Ds in college science courses!); and, life is not all work and no play (she is an artist).

This is the fourth year for the Careers in Science annual lunchtime talk, which was started by Upper School Science Teacher Vivian Liao. Previous speakers have included a molecular biologist PhD/MBA who works in investment banking on life science startups, a game designer and a marketing professional from codeSpark, a local startup that makes games to teach kids to code, a marine microbiologist who is the Undergraduate Programs Director at USC’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, and a statistician who studies human trafficking and teaches at SIT Graduate Institute in Washington, D.C.

Westridge School, 324 Madeline Drive, Pasadena, (626) 799-1053 ext. 200 or visit www.westridge.org.