Conner Knickel

I have spent the past 7 years in the aerospace industry doing mostly program management from lunar payloads and landers to IR imagers to managing new business strategy of emerging satellite products. I try to approach my professional career in terms of what benefit I can offer the world, how do my skills, experience, background intersect with making the world a better place. I try to do that directly through mission driven NGO work and community organizing work and indirectly through the 'how' my work is conducted.

My advice to students...

Follow your interest-following your passion always seemed so challenging to me, treating your professional career as a journey of discovery and exploration has been empowering and energizing for me. Get close to the shovel - I think the most important ability for high performers is the ability to contextualize stories/experiences and apply them to different situations. This looks like learning from stories that are happening all around you and being able to apply them to how you handle
various personal and professional situations. The closer you can get to decisions or doing the work yourself like making a tough risk decision or leadership decision for the team your greater learning outcome because you know more of the inputs, context and can map and learn from each one of those variables/details. A day spent helping assemble a spacecraft is 10x spending a day listening to a technician talk about the challenges (both are important but hopefully you get my point).