An MIT alumna has won a Good Housekeeping Awesome Women Award, which honors women who are, magazine says, “redefining race, fighting poverty, reinventing fashion, literally saving lives, and more.” Tiera Guinn ’17, a design engineer at Boeing who is building a spacecraft to put humans on Mars, is one of 10 honorees.
“Some kids dream of being princesses, but Tiera Guinn wanted to build rockets,” Guinn's profile in the magazine states. “In June 2016, she realized that dream when Boeing hired her to design and analyze the hardware for the largest NASA rocket ever created — one that’s meant to take humans to Mars — before her recent graduation from MIT.”
Guinn told the magazine that it is “humbling to be a part of this moment in history.”
The article cites Guinn's passion for space exploration and her advocacy for diversity in STEM, which dates back to her time at MIT where she majored in aeronautics and astronautics. As co-chair of MIT’s Black Women’s Alliance, she introduced astronaut Yvonne Cagle at an MIT community-wide talk, “Women in Space,” in May 2015.
The Good Housekeeping award is not the first time Guinn has been recognized for her work. Already this year, she’s been featured in Essence magazine, the The Huffington Post, and USA Today, where she has shared her hopes for the future of STEM education and the story of how she first fell in love with math at the grocery store.
In a February story, Huffington Post Black Voices said Guinn “will soon be graduating from MIT with a 5.0 GPA and is clearly on a path to success. She said she’d advise young girls looking to follow in her footsteps to expect obstacles throughout their journey.”
“You have to look forward to your dream and you can’t let anybody get in the way of it,” Guinn is quoted as saying. “No matter how tough it may be, no matter how many tears you might cry, you have to keep pushing. And you have to understand that nothing comes easy. Keeping your eyes on the prize, you can succeed.”
