Work Ethic + x = Success

Hello, Willard Wild Cats! Thanks for letting us get in on the CLAWS thing!

For my post today, I'm going to focus on the W, work ethic, because I think it's the key to success in any endeavor.

In my latest book, Wonder Women of Science, my co-author Tiera Fletcher and I had the pleasure of interviewing a dozen extremely smart women who are killing in right now in various STEM fields. (Tiera actually rounds out the baker's dozen: she is a rocket scientist working with NASA on the Mars mission!) Some of the women we interviewed were blessed with natural talent. They never struggled in school and were always at the top of their classes. But a few of the women in our book did struggle. So how'd they make it?

In 2017, Dr. Mareena Robinson Snowden, now a senior engineer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, became the first black woman to earn a Ph.D in Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. Not too shabby! 

You'd probably assume that she was naturally great in her STEM classes, but that actually wasn't the case.  She told us, "There were other students in my classes who 'got it' immediately, whatever the concept was. That wasn't me. I absolutely hated those math problems that said things like, 'It is intuitively obvious that...' or 'It can easily be derived...' because math wasn't intuitively obvious to me or easy to derive." So Robinson Snowden put in the work, and that's what she credits for her success. "There are a lot of talented people who never realize their goals because they don't have the work ethic," she told us. 

I am so grateful that Dr. Robinson Snowden shared that with us. When something isn't easy, it's so tempting to just say, "That's not my thing," and give up too quickly. But people such as Robinson Snowden can inspire us to keep working towards our goals. 

Maybe someday, someone will be writing a book about highly successful people and include YOU!

Ginger Rue's next book, Wonder Women of Science, is now available for pre-order. Co-authored with rocket scientist Tiera Fletcher, who is currently working with NASA on the Mars mission, the book profiles a dozen amazing women (besides Tiera!) who are blazing new trails in their respective STEM fields.