Hi Cindy Forde! What is your job and what is the most exciting part about the work that you do?
My job is to help children understand that they are part of a brilliant, interconnected system called Earth and that they can be part of creating what happens next to our planet. The most exciting thing is watching children discover their own potential.
What motivated and inspired you to pursue a career in the STEM industry?
The more children understand about the world around them and how it works the more they understand they have a really important role to play in it.
What is the biggest misconception about your job?
That learning how to take care of the planet that sustains us all is only for green people!
What were you like as a child and what interests and hobbies did you have?
I was a child who believed books were a highly reliable form of travel in time and space and so it was best to always have one handy for quick getaways!
What advice would you give your eight-year-old self about building a career in space?
Space is actually a lot less boring than men fighting over who’s got the biggest rocket and who can get to which rock fastest. Space holds the secret to how worlds are created, to our place in this incredible system of worlds within worlds, why it so magical and so important that we take care of it. Understanding that can help us to live in a more caring way on Earth and make a lot more people happy. What do you think about that for a job?
Why do you think it’s important for humans travel and explore Mars?
To develop more respect for the brilliance of life on Earth, why we are so privileged to live on this beautiful, blue planet how wonderful its life forms are and how barbarous it is for us to be pushing so many of them to the brink of extinction when we are the only planet to have such amazing diversity and abundance in our known universe.
Where do you think we’ll be in 50 years in terms of Mars exploration?
Humans have a lot of growing up to do as a species before we will make good interplanetary citizens. I hope that happens in the next 50 years, and this generation of children grow into much more intelligent life forms than their parents, or I am not sure other planet’s and their life possible life forms will really want us at large out there!
Cindy appears in Activity 3.2 Breaking News of Chapter Three of both the Mars Diary and the Space Diary. Download the activity and teaching notes for Mars Diary here and for Space Diary here.
