This week’s Wednesday’s Women in STEM Series features Gwynne Shotwell, the President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX. Read on to see how she turned her engineering background into a career in business, becoming the 70th most powerful woman in the world according to Forbes.
It all started when she attended an event for the Society for Women engineers when she was 16 years old. “I was a grumpy teenager. I didn’t want to be at that event. But, there was a female mechanical engineer that sat on the panel. I was fascinated with what she had to say. She owned her own company, she was developing construction materials that were environmentally friendly, [and] she also had a play with solar energy. I was fascinated with what she did.”
Shotwell went on to received both her BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University. She initially wanted hands-on engineering roles so she worked on thermal analysis research at The Aerospace Corporation for ten years. After that, she moved to Microcosm Inc, a company that build low-cost rockets, to become the director of space systems in charge of research and development.
In 2002, Shotwell joined SpaceX as its eleventh employee. She currently holds the title of President and COO and is responsible for the day-to-day operations and company growth. In this role, she has had to take many chances and make decisions that are risky. From the development of the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket in the world, to SpaceX’s goal to send people to Mars by 2024, Shotwell knows failure is part of the job but “failure while you’re trying and you’re testing is not terrible. You’re learning from it.”
Her advice for the next generation of women in tech: keep trying and work as hard as you can.
“You have no control over whether you are going to be the smartest person at your company or even the smartest person in the room at any particular time, particularly at a company like SpaceX; there are a lot of smart people here. But, you do have control on how prepared you are, how hard you work and what kind of results you get.”