Lead Like a Girl
Marking the Women's Centennial, 缅北强奸 has invited Sylvia Acevedo, chief executive officer of the Girl Scouts, to deliver the 2020 Commencement address鈥攙irtually鈥攐n Oct. 17.
A lifelong Girl Scout, engineer, rocket scientist, and advocate for girl empowerment and STEM education, Sylvia Acevedo credits her own Girl Scout experience with propelling her to success in the corporate and philanthropic sectors.
She was one of the first Hispanic students, male or female, to earn a graduate engineering degree from Stanford University鈥攁n MS in industrial engineering鈥攁nd she holds a bachelor of science degree with honors in industrial engineering from New Mexico State University.
She began her career as a rocket scientist at NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she created algorithms and analyzed data from Voyager 2鈥檚 spacecraft flyby of Jupiter and two of its moons, Io and Europa. She has been an engineer and executive at Apple, Dell, Autodesk, and IBM. She was tapped to lead the Girl Scout organization in 2017.
鈥淚 understand the power of Girl Scouting. I understand how it changes destinies because it changed mine,鈥� Acevedo said in a 2016 interview. 鈥淭hrough Girl Scouts, I launched a rocket into the clear, blue New Mexico sky to earn my Science badge. Girl Scouts gave me the courage, the confidence, and the character to enter the engineering field at a time when girls didn鈥檛 do that, when people of my background didn鈥檛 do that."