Faith Gonzalez
Texas beginnings
Gonzalez was born in El Paso, Texas, the largest border city in the U.S. Its sister city, Ciudad Juárez, where half of her family is from, is a Mexican city located on the banks of the Rio Grande just south of El Paso. A second-generation Mexican American, Gonzalez grew up in a middle-class family. Her parents, Jesus Manuel Gonzalez and Norma Nevarez, both worked hard to ensure they always had everything they needed to strive.
Gonzalez says her dad is a musically gifted, groovy, car-loving guy covered in tattoos who enjoys living every day like it matters.
While her dad was deployed, her large extended family provided much-needed support to her mother during her pregnancy with Gonzalez. Her paternal grandmother, Maria, moved in with the family after Gonzalez was born and became the caregiver for Gonzalez and her brother Christian, who was born four years later. Maria, who was raised in Ciudad Juárez, learned the importance of hard work and perseverance from her parents, who were cheese merchants. Gonzalez says her grandmother is a person who believes in making the best out of every day she's alive. They talk daily and Gonzalez considers her grandmother her best friend.
Her mother, a calm woman who loved horror movies and novels more than the good food she cooked, worked long, physically demanding hours in a dry cleaners. Gonzalez remembers her mother returning home late in the evenings after working all day in a hot, noisy environment, too tired to do more than unwind in front of the TV with her two kids watching their favorite TV shows.
Growing up, Gonzalez, a self-taught painter, loved her colored pencils the most and was often gifted with painting and drawing tools. She drew all the time and amassed quite a collection of sketchbooks filled with drawings of the cartoons she watched, the flowers she saw, and the people she met. She played Tetris on her Radical Tetris Pocket and read Nancy Drew mysteries. She would often sit with her grandmother and watch soccer games, go on car rides with her dad and her younger brother, Christian, or cuddle up next to her mother to read.
Gonzalez said her family often went bowling, attended car shows, or visited local museums. They loved to eat and often had family gatherings on the weekends. More than anything else, Gonzalez believes food connected them as a family. Her parents influenced her to be a good person, to find success in the small things, to take pride in her accomplishments, and to define achievement in her own way. Gonzalez says that by succeeding academically and professionally, she honored the sacrifices her parents made for her.
Higher education
Gonzalez graduated from the Da Vinci School for Science and Arts in June 2016. After graduation, she attended a dual program with Mary Baldwin University, or MBU, and Virginia Military Institute, or VMI, in Staunton, Virginia, from August 2016 to April 2017.
Gonzalez earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering in 2021 from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, or UAH, with a minor in astrophysics and astronomy. She says her grandmother was proud that her granddaughter pursued a career in the STEM field.
During her second year at UAH, Gonzalez, was struggling to stay afloat. She felt out of place due to her background—most of her classmates came from well-educated and affluent families. She lacked self-confidence, felt she couldn't relate, and felt an intense amount of pressure to prove she belonged there. She didn’t have family nearby, and eventually, she began to feel isolated. This led to bouts of depression and impostor. She still sees a therapist regularly and says that working through her mental health issues, versus ignoring them, greatly improved her quality of life. syndrome, which she describes as a feeling of being a fake or a phony despite her achievements. She didn't eat, she didn't sleep, she overstudied, and she overworked.
Career
Gonzalez has lived in Huntsville for eight years and has worked at the Redstone Test Center, or RTC, located at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, for the last four years as a test engineer in the Climatics Test Division of the Environmental and Component Test Directorate.
Before coming to RTC, Gonzalez worked in the Systems Management and Production Center, or SMAP, at UAH, as a research associate performing funded undergraduate research for government, industry, and university organizations. At SMAP, she was responsible for compiling data and performing statistics across several projects. One of the projects was InSPIRESS, which she first participated in as a high school student. InSPIRESS is an outreach project designed for high school students to create a scientific payload to accommodate a spacecraft mission housed at UAH.
She also worked on RAMP-UP and the Engineering Perceptions, two State of STEM programs that went hand in hand. RAMP-UP was a high-altitude ballooning and amateur rocketry project that used scientific payloads to connect high school, middle school, and elementary students. Engineering Perceptions and State of STEM were both statistical and data structured. For both projects, she worked with high school students to determine whether STEM exposure was linked to an interest in STEM.
Listening and trust
Gonzalez actively focuses on developing her communication skills to maintain an open line of communication and to build trust across customer and functional areas. She regularly asks technicians if they see anything that needs improvement. Her superpower has become listening to her associates, customers, and other engineers to create a feasible test schedule that meets all testing requirements. By listening to the perspectives of all key players and gathering the required information, she has been able to organize entire projects to work through the milestones that need to be met.
Currently, she is also a member of the Quality Champions team. The team's mission is to familiarize newly arrived engineers, technicians, and technical writers with the test mission and their role in helping to accomplish that mission. Each Quality Champion team member is responsible for providing information specific to their functional area.
Giving back
Gonzalez is a hard worker who takes immense pride in her professional career and is equally passionate about helping her community. What few people may know is that she is enthusiastic about volunteering. She volunteers monthly at non-profit organizations in Huntsville, sometimes as a food distributor but often as a translator.
She has participated in numerous environmental cleanups, including "Adopt-a-Highway" programs, mountain and trail cleanups, and local park cleanups. She has worked at various soup kitchens and women's refuge shelters, and she also helped build homes for Habitat for Humanity of El Paso. Throughout her many years of volunteering, she says she must have spent over 1,000 hours helping those in need, consistently volunteering every week, both while in school, during summer breaks, and after graduating from high school and college. For her, the friendships she formed and the mutual support, sharing, teaching, learning, and connecting with others makes volunteering a rewarding experience.
Gonzalez says she has always been motivated to do her best. She takes every action and decision she makes seriously—it's the same thing she would want someone to do for her family. She was brought up to always put full effort into whatever she did and to take pride in a job well done. She believes in being a diligent worker and taking pride in the job she has chosen to do. In a world where some are complacent, just doing the bare minimum, she tries her best to do the best she can. She says that’s just how she was raised.
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