The road to success is not easy. Sandra Cauffman is from Hatillo and she is conquering the stars.
She had a difficult childhood and adolescence, attacked by poverty and domestic violence.
Nevertheless, this electrical engineer was able to overcome all problems: she used her skills and talents to get ahead and nowadays she is the current deputy director of the Division of Earth Sciences from the National Administration of Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Cauffman thinks she is successful thanks to her mother:
My mom is my hero, she grew up in an orphan and she was alone. She was a role model, she told me to keep pushing, to dream, to achieve as much as I could. Her life situations made her stronger. Sadly she was raped twice and we were born as consequence of that. However, she always supported us and told us to study and we have always seen the bright side of life.
One day, her mother took her to a friend’s house to see Apollo moon landing and her dream began:
I thought: ‘I want to be in a place where things like these can be done.’ Within the time I realized I was good at maths and physics and it was a way to reach my dream.
She had to study industrial engineering at UCR because women were not allowed in Electrical engineering. However, she decided to go the United States to study the career she really wanted to. After finishing her career, she went to a job fair where there was a vacant position at a NASA contractor and she was hired. After three years, she started working at NASA.
Cauffman has information about climate change, Mars and she is in charge of all missions related to the Earth.
She is well-informed in terms of views from space and she is proud to say that Costa Rica, from the satellite, is known due to its verdant territory.
The country is a leader, being carbon neutral is important for the us. Costa Rica has forests, it has more national parks than any other country in the world, so I applaud what this country is doing and I feel very proud of it,
declared Cauffman.