Aisha Bowe Was Told To Forget Her STEM Dreams, Now She’s Headed To Space

Source: Blue Origin / Blue Origin

Aisha Bowe entered the meeting with a 2.3 GPA and a plan. The high school student was going to study science. Her guidance counselor doused doubt on her aspirations, but teenaged Bowe wasn’t ready to push back against the counselor’s heavy-handed suggestions.

“Up until that point in my life, I believed what other people told me about myself to be true,” Bowe told HelloBeautiful. “When I saw guidance for my guidance counselor, and she suggested that I pursue cosmetology, I didn’t stop to say. What if she’s wrong? What if I’m capable of far more than she suggested?” Bowe held cosmetologists near to her heart. Her choice wasn’t about diminishing their profession. It was about pursuing her own passion. “It wasn’t that cosmetology would have been a bad life choice,” she said. “It was just this idea that her suggestions limited my thoughts about future potential choices.”

Seeing Clear

Bowe used community college to reach her academic goals. Two-year institutions are an important alternative for students taking a different path. She steeled herself against others’ visions for her life there. “I had gotten tired of people telling me what I couldn’t do. I also had gotten tired of feeling bad about myself,” she said.

“When I had the opportunity to evaluate how I thought about myself, I realized that most of my thoughts were shaped by the opinions of others. And those were opinions that I no longer felt that I wanted to believe were true,” she continued. “What I decided to do was commit to the unrealistic reality of my own making, and that unrealistic reality was that I was going to be somebody.”

Committing To Excellence

The film Hidden Figures was one of the few examples of a career blueprint that Bowe had. “ There are very few African American women or people who are in aerospace, let alone working in space science. So when I had this idea, people just thought that I lost my marbles and that there was just absolutely no way. ‘There’s no NASA in Michigan! How are you going to go from community college?'”

She turned to visualization to cement her goals. “I made a list. I put that list on the back of my bedroom door, and my list wasn’t long. It was short, but it was impactful. And every day I left my bedroom, I looked at that list, and I prayed over that list, and that’s what I was focused on,” said Bowe.

That meant cutting out distractions. “Whenever you pursue a dream that other people either do not understand or do not believe you will achieve. There’s always a lot of static , and if you hear that static, you’re on the right track.”

She selected classes that would allow her to transfer to one of the top engineering schools in the country. “I graduated with degrees that people told me I would never receive,” said Bowe. “I started working for NASA, which is an incredible testament to believing in yourself.

Source: Blue Origin / Blue Origin

Spreading Out

After going from an unsteady teen to a rocket scientist, she founded STEMBoard, “an award-winning technical firm that provides exclusive advisory services to premier federal and commercial organizations.” She will be joining BlueOrigin on a commercial flight to space. “Space is the culmination of what I consider to be my life’s work. As a person who is in aerospace, I had always dreamed of seeing Earth through space,” she said.

Bowe will be one of few Black women to have that experience. She will also be the first person of Bahamian descent, but she wants to be one of many marginalized people in the field. She founded LINGO, “a self-paced coding kit that empowers learners with technical concepts at home,” so everyone could believe that STEM was for them. “This is not about me. This is about this idea that the [next] 50 years of space looks a lot different than the last 50,” said Bowe.

She frequently shares how she reached the heights of the aerospace industry with the public, encouraging others not to give up. “The first thing you have to do is commit yourself and commit to the dream,” said Bowe.

Creating A Legacy

“I would love to tell you that everybody in my life was on board with this dream or this idea. They weren’t because they had never seen anybody do it,” said Bowe. She is proud to be an example a new generation of STEM professionals can look up to. “My father immigrated to the United States in the 80s to pursue higher education. My mom didn’t finish college, and here I am; I’ve gone further than the previous generations,” said Bowe.

“I’m representing a legacy of folks who always put their best foot forward.”

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