In 2016, Nadia Sánchez created the She Is Foundation. An initiative whose mission is empower girls and women in vulnerable conditions through entrepreneurship and education in science and technology.
Through its various programs, in the last 6 years they have benefited more than 16,000 girls and women. But there is one idea in particular that she has impacted 131 lives between the ages of 9 and 16, since 2021: She Is Astronaut-Immersion.
Since 2021, the Foundation established a strategic alliance with the NASA Space Center in Houston, Texas, United States, so that girls in vulnerable conditions from Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic, have the opportunity to be there for 1 week, once they complete a 4-month virtual course on leadershiptechnology, entrepreneurship, robotics and innovation.
This immersion not only allows them see first-hand the museum that houses more than 400 space artifacts, including the collection of lunar rocks and samples brought back from the Moon, but empowering, motivating and inspiring them to be agents of change in their communities.
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In this way, for this 2023, two Colombian students were selected among 5,259 minors from all over the country who, thanks to the Vinci Foundation, one of the allies of this program.
For your choice, took into account their interest in the skills STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)but also the expectations and capacities that they demonstrated regarding replicating in their territories everything they learn in this process.
“They are girls who speak of the power of empowering others and showing opportunities beyond what they have at home,” said Leidy Martínez, coordinator of the program she is an astronaut for Latin America of She Is.
This is how through this experience, which already began thanks to the robotics activities, programming, rocketry, talks with flight directors and space travel simulations; and experiences in lunar habitats, can also be an example of breaking gender stereotypes and the glass ceiling, so that through education, they improve their living conditions and that of their families.
“We all have one goal and one life”: Angélica, the future neurologist
María Angélica Páez is 16 years old, she is in eleventh grade and her likes are knitting and sleeping, of course, she mentions it between laughs. She is a bit nervous, but as she asks how she came to the world of Science, she is letting go and talks with enthusiasm about what she wants to be when she grows up: a doctor.
“My forte is mathematics, but lately with a friend that I have we have been very interested in the subject of the brain. And unlike the numbers it is not absolute. It is an unknown world that has not been 100% explored.”
Due to his curiosity, he tells me that when a professor tells him about a certain scientific article, he comes home and investigates it, such as “the seven senses or the pineal gland”. In addition, although it is very impressive for him to touch a brain, his first experience in medicine was studying a cow’s heart “and it feels like gelatinous.”
Regarding her selection process, she assures that she took the step without having many expectations and months later, when she opened the door of her house located in the municipality of Soacha, they were waiting for her to give her the great news. “I went into shock and I feel like I’m still like that.”
In the United States, this future doctor hopes to “acquire a lot of knowledge, because there are the tough ones”. And mainly to be able to observe the universe, “with all that hand of telescopes”.
It is like this, as María Angélica does not hesitate to tell women, no matter how old they are, exploit their abilities “because you have them for a reason and they can trigger in many good things in your life. Do it because no one else is going to do it for you.”
She is Silvana and she may be the next Colombian woman to work for NASA
Silvana Cuadros is 11 years old, she is in seventh grade. He lives in Silvania, Cundinamarca in a house with his mother, aunt, dogs and cats. Which is why, of course, she is an animal lover and proud of her roots.
His house, in the middle of so much green, has allowed him to contemplate the sky at night, like nowhere else. And that is how he found his greatest passion: astronomy.
“Since I was little I have seen how great scientists make discoveries about what the stars or the moon are made of. Things that get very close to astronauts and that seems very cool to me.
Within his observations he remembers a specific one: the red moon. “When I saw her, she seemed very pretty. I tried to see the green comet but I couldn’t. And once I was in Bogotá getting my passport, it was already night and I managed to see the Pleiades and the constellation of Scorpio”.
When I asked him about how he had been informed that he was going to travel to the NASA Space Center, he narrated what happened in great detail: “I heard the news at the College. I was in training and my teammates already knew. Everyone moved me, but I couldn’t with the emotion ”.
On the trip, Silvana hopes to find many rockets and get on them, especially since she has a task assigned by one of her schoolmates. “To tell him how the bed was going inside a rocket: whether vertical or horizontal.”
Finally, Silvana shares a message to other girls and women, who, like her, also want to conquer the world and make their way in a world of men. “We are capable of achieving everything. Reach the sky if we do not propose it. Our hearts were created to fly beyond the stars.