You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Dacia Williams does something very, very cool.

She's a quality engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.

My job is to ensure the safety and the quality of everything that we build.

So you're making sure everything is like on the up and up before it goes into space.

So I get to get in a clean room every day

and do a lot of inspections on how tight a screw is being tight

or how are we keeping this hardware clean so that we don't get our germs into space.

We make sure this thing actually works once it is launched.

She loves her job.

But it didn't start that way.

When Dacia got to NASA in 2018, just out of college,

it was very exciting, a little bit overwhelming.

I suffered from a little bit of imposter syndrome for sure.

And a big confusing, I will be honest.

What do you mean by a bit confusing?

There is no women in my group.

There are only a few African-Americans in my group

or people of color for that matter.

So nobody looked like me, no one acted like me.

So it was definitely different and I did not fit in.

That feeling of not fitting in at a place like NASA is something that Dacia is working to change.

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