From New York’s projects to Nasa: aerospace engineer Dr Aprille Joy Ericsson on her journey
The high-achiever has had her eyes on the stars since high school. She talks about how athletics helped her become all-rounded and gave her the confidence to work in a male-dominated field
No fool I was born on April 1, 1963 – April Fool’s Day. I grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, New York. I went to school locally, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood, until I was five and then entered into a busing programme, which sent me across Brooklyn to PS (Public School) 199 elementary. I did extremely well, especially in maths, science and reading, but it was a long commute every day.
I loved staying with my grandparents in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wanted to go to school there, but Mom said I could go only if I got a scholarship to a private school, which I did. I ended up going to Cambridge School in Massachusetts – an even longer commute; 90 minutes from my grandparents’ house to school every day. It was a small school on a beautiful campus in the woods and we had creative professionals – photographers, artists, sculptors – who taught there, so I also developed an artistic side.
I was very athletic. I had a school friend who became a famous basketball player, Patrick Ewing. We grew up together and played at the rec centre. I shot pool. I found out later that was a good way to learn physics. My physics teacher would take us to the pool table at school and show us vectors and magnitudes and how you could visualise what you were seeing in terms of physics. I became good at pool because I understood that really well.
Pushy motherI have three younger sisters – the youngest is a half-sister who lived in New York with a different mother. My sister, Trina, looks a lot like me – we are three days shy of a year’s difference in age. My other sister, Dawn, is a medical doctor; she is the smartest of all of us and speaks multiple languages.
My mother was the pusher academically. When I was little, I used to look at my parents, who both liked to sketch. I liked to draw and had the opportunity to mature that a bit in high school. I think that, from a perspective of innovation or design, having a background of three-dimensional awareness can be helpful. I was an avid reader – I would even walk into signposts reading as I walked down the street. But maths was the thing I was always really good at.
Ready for take-off A high-school teacher who began to see me excel was an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) graduate. She suggested I enter a programme for minority high-school students at MIT, so I applied that summer and got in. They took us to an airport base and I got to watch planes do touch-and-goes, where they touch down and take back off, from a control tower. I thought that was so cool. I got to go in a flight simulator and scored two points off a pilots’ score.