Anyone looking at Rose Ferreira, an astronomy student at Arizona State
University and a NASA intern, cannot imagine the road she has taken.
As a child, the young woman grew up in the Dominican Republic and did not
have access to education. She eventually relocated to New York, where she
encountered an even harsher reality: she visited violent areas, had limited
access to school, and was homeless in one of the major cities in the United
States.
But there was always something that piqued her interest: what could explain
space? The doubts stem from her childhood, when she endured blackouts in her
hometown. She was obliged to survive solely by the light of the moon
throughout those times.
“The Moon was a lot of what I used to see and I was always
curious about it,” he said, in NASA news website interview. "That obsession
is what made me start asking questions."
It was the many unanswered questions that helped her through the storm.
Before arriving at university, Rose worked as a home health assistant and
studied through EJA (Youth and Adult Education). She still needed to recover
from a hit-and-run and cancer treatment.
It was only after that that she was finally able to enroll in college. In
July of this year, she received the email of her life: she was going to be
an intern at NASA.
Dream of being an astronaut
If as a child Rose Ferreira didn't even know what NASA was, today she wants
to become an astronaut for the US space agency. She says that she felt the
greatest emotion of her life when she saw for the first time the image of a
field of galaxies in the James Webb telescope, in July.
“I went into the bathroom and cried a little,” he recalls, now
laughing. “Being able to contribute in some way to the efforts of the NASA
team felt like such a strong thing to me. After that, I was in shock for a
week.”
In his internship, Ferreira advised the teams that launched the largest
space science telescope of all time at the Goddard Space Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland.
She also supported live interviews on James Webb's first released images and
other multimedia assignments for NASA's Spanish-language communications
program. Now, her short-term goal is to earn a doctoral degree. And, then,
who knows how to fulfill the dream of being an astronaut.
“Discover what you love”
Rose Ferreira left a piece of advice for young people who also
want to follow space science. “Coming from a person who had a little more
trouble getting there, I think, first, find out if it's really what you
love,” she advises.
"And if it's really what you love," then literally find a way
to do it, no matter who says what."
She says the process, while difficult, was worth it. Her interest now lies
in the Artemis mission, which will explore the Moon, her longtime “friend”.
“Even when I lived on the streets, the moon used to be the
thing I looked to to calm myself down. It’s my sense of comfort even today
when I’m overwhelmed with things,” she said. "It's my driving force."