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Carolyn Parcheta Highlight
If there’s something that you want to do all the time, you’ll find a way to make a living out of it.
About Carolyn
- Has loved volcanoes since she was a young child; even won an elementary-school science fair with a volcano she’d built.
- Even as she got older, every time she saw a TV show or a magazine article about volcanoes, she was interested.
- When she was in high school, everyone started saying, “Follow your dreams,” so she thought, “Why not?”
- Spent five years on Hawaii doing research for her Ph.D. in physical volcanology.
- Says that getting your Ph.D. proves to people that you can think independently, you can learn on the fly, and you can solve problems.
- While she was in Hawaii, she watched lava rising out of a crack in the ground and became obsessed with the question, “What’s down there? What’s below that crack?”
- From those initial questions, she was able to present the scientific benefits of knowing what was inside of volcanoes to NASA, who decided to fund her project.
- Taught herself everything she needed to know about coding and robotics by asking “almost 100 questions a day” and taking online classes on her own time.
