An aerospace engineer who worked in Nasa for six years and has been running an engineering firm for over a decade, said she wasn’t interested in science and mathematics while “growing up”.

Aisha Bowe did not decide to become “an aerospace engineer” until she was 18 and her degrees in aerospace engineering started with “pre-algebra” in a community college in the US.

“My story is one of discovery and understanding that sometimes when you are young and don’t do something well, you make the mistake of thinking that you can’t do it. It is because you don’t try,” said Bowe, during a media interaction at the American Center on Monday.

“For me, I had to confront very early that maybe I was wrong, maybe I could do math and science and maybe I could be great at it,” she said.

Bowe, who was previously an aerospace engineer at Nasa’s Ames Research Center and focused on miniature satellites and aircraft trajectory optimisation, is currently the CEO of STEMBoard, a certified economically disadvantaged women-owned small business specialising in engineering and development, IT services, program, and project management, data management, ingestion and analytics.

She is scheduled to be flying into space next year.

In Calcutta, she spoke to students and educators before leaving for Chennai. Before Calcutta, she was in Delhi and Mumbai.

This is her maiden trip to India.

While addressing educators, she said they were responsible for motivating students to take up challenges because their words have “power.”

Any student’s low performance at present does not indicate that they don’t have the potential, she said.

Bowe, an African-American woman and a former Nasa rocket scientist, who grew up in Michigan in the US, said it was “hard” for a woman like her to get to where she is.

“It was hard. It still is hard,” she said. “I wouldn’t necessarily say I was given any special opportunity,” she said.

“Once I got into my job people either thought that I didn’t deserve to be there
or that I would not measure up. I realised that because they may not have met somebody like me or they may not have had the opportunity to work with someone like me, there were all these ideas about people like me that were wrong,” she said.

“For many years, before the internet and pictures, I carried my degrees in the back of my trunk because when I would go and speak to school kids as they didn’t believe I had the degrees,” Bowe said.

Speaking about going to space, Bowe said: “The idea of finally making it to space and being able to look down on the earth and see just terrain, no borders is exciting and I can’t wait to have that opportunity.”