Cayla Withers is a Southern Black American woman of faith and an aerospace engineering student at Stanford University who is following a beautiful legacy of Black American women engineers from the South, deemed Hidden Figures. Withers’ dream is to travel to space one day and create her own legacy. While she is living out this amazing dream, there is so much turbulence she has to endure. But no matter how much turbulence there is… she just will not give up! Follow Withers as she takes off into a unique destiny full of crazy experiences and recounts her time majoring in engineering, reminisces about parts of her journey and drops Hidden Gems along the way.
The rocket shook quickly as it was getting ready for takeoff.
“8, 7, 6, 5, 4,… ” My eyes widened. “3, 2, 1… ” John Glenn nervously awaited a once-in-a-lifetime flight as he was strapped and compacted into the space vehicle. Was he going to make it out alive? A room full of Black women known as “human computers” looked in awe as their company’s work was about to be put into action. America’s heart pounded while they gathered together to watch this momentous event outside with binoculars and in living rooms all across the country.
“Liftoff.”
The 95-foot rocket dashed into glorious distances of outer space, and the dangerous, daunting mission that many had doubts about was now in full effect. Moments later, John Glenn had broken the Kármán line, finally reaching space: a place few had gone to before. He had previously refused to risk the mission if Katherine Johnson did not double-check the go-no-go calculations that the IBM gave. Glenn stared into the distance of space, circling the beautiful, blue planet that he inhabited, becoming the first American to orbit the Earth. Katherine Johnson stood in the control room, in a burgundy dress, superior to NASA’s IBM computer surrounded by a galaxy of White men dressed in similar white-collared shirts and black ties. They all watched the launch together as the numbers she calculated were being put into action. “That’s my girllll,” I yelled with tears coming down from my hazel green eyes. I had officially witnessed one of the first-ever successful rocket launches with human life aboard, a generational miracle that was birthed by Katherine Johnson who was a genius, Southern Black American woman just like me.
In those moments of watching arguably the greatest mathematician to have ever lived put one of the first humans in orbit, I received a greater call from beyond, and it was cemented in me that I would one day be a powerful aerospace engineer, stepping into a legacy and a glory of beautiful, brilliant, Southern Black American women engineers of faith known to be “Hidden Figures.”
Cayla Withers posing with the “Hidden Figures” Book by Margot Lee Shetterly in a graduation photo. (Photo: SOLMIH KIM/The Stanford Daily)
Before watching the movie “Hidden Figures,” I did not know what aerospace engineering was, or what engineering was in general. I did not come from a school or community that had much exposure to engineering, and no one in my family was an engineer. But when I was about 16 years old, I remember a family member raced to me in awe with tears in their eyes, telling me how I just had to watch this movie.
“Cayla, you need to watch this movie. You remind me of how genius them Black girls in that movie are… you just like them,” they exclaimed. A young, unconfident me who truly did not know how intelligent she was stood there in disbelief. This interaction not only left me curious to know what they were talking about, but their words stirred a gentle pull in me to watch the movie. I watched it, and I eventually found out that that family member was absolutely right. I was exactly like the women in the movie, I just did not truly know it then. The movie ended up being transformational for me. Truth be told, the movie not only inspired me but changed the trajectory of my life. Because of “Hidden Figures,” I gave birth to an unconventional dream, and I was shifted onto a new path in life, stepping into a field where very few people looked like me.
After my encounter with “Hidden Figures,” I went to school even more excited in my mathematics and science classes. My high school did not offer any Advanced Placement (AP) physics courses and did not have many AP courses in general, but I took the highest level science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) classes they had, usually being the only Black person or Black woman in the classroom. In my free time, I applied to a summer engineering program at one of the world’s best engineering universities: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I had finally reached a new height of life, doing things I could not truly believe… things that people where I come from had not really done. I ended up being accepted into the MIT summer program and would be headed for Massachusetts for the first time in my life. I finished high school with above a 4.0 GPA, I worked on implementing a National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Junior chapter at my school, I won over $130,000 in outside scholarships and I had gotten into Stanford University to study my dream major, aeronautical/astronautical engineering.
This was incredible because no one from my high school had really gotten into top schools. Less than one-third of the students there at the time went to college and even less than that actually stayed in college. To have been one of the students from my town who went off to college to study such a unique and difficult major was a complete blessing from above. Fast forward a few years later, I thought back to “Hidden Figures” and how it pushed me onto such a special and miraculous journey. The rocket launch scene from the movie replayed in my mind, but this time I saw myself in Katherine Johnson’s position. It was 15 years into the future, and I was standing in a room full of engineers who looked differently than me, wearing a fly dress and some heels, doing the calculations to take man to Mars. And I thought to myself how it was so amazing that a movie I watched as a teen birthed a great dream in me that is finally manifesting into a reality larger than the galaxy.
