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She's Starting College at Age 12, With Plans to Be a NASA Engineer
11-year-old Alena Analeigh, from Texas, has set her sights on becoming a NASA engineer of the future.
Culture & Entertainment
Over the course of the pandemic, the landscape of education has drastically changed, but that hasn’t kept one brilliant girl whose dreams have never been earthbound from reaching for the stars.
While most pre-teens are navigating the challenges of middle school, at age 12, Alena Analeigh has already earned her high school diploma and is set to attend Arizona State University via remote learning in May.
With a planned double major in astronomical/planetary science and chemistry, Alena’s goal is to become a NASA engineer by the time she’s 16, where she hopes to employ her extraordinary skills to build rovers like the ones sent to Mars on missions.
“I’ll be driving one of those future space mobiles by the time I graduate college,” she told ABC News.
A heady goal, perhaps, but according to Alena’s mom Daphne McQuarter, her daughter had already set her sights on a career with the space agency when she was a little girl.
“She would always say, ‘Mommy, I’m going to work for NASA,’” McQuarter told Good Morning America. “Then she would start saying, ‘I’m going to be the youngest Black girl to ever work for NASA—watch!’”
Alena’s space odyssey began with her early passion for Lego building toys, from which she’s built intricate models of everything from the Taj Mahal, the Disney castle, and the Millennium Falcon, to the Apollo 11 rover and a NASA rocket.