The most important advice is always to believe in yourself and have confidence in your abilities. Understand what you want in life, and then pursue it with determination. You may achieve it, or maybe not; in any case you would have learnt a lot more about yourself and what you really desire. If you know your direction, the journey is more important than the destination. Specifically for non-tech space enthusiasts: be aware that you are as important as the tech people for the success of any mission. Collaboration is the key of every space achievement, and non-tech roles are often the enablers of missions. Last, but not least, build a network of people that you enjoy spending time with, and that you would like to see succeeding in their aspirations. Support them when you can and only if you are happy to, without expecting anything in return. The universe (call it karma, or call it team spirit), will give back to you 😊

I am a good communicator, I am well organised, I understand how people think, and how business works. In my role communication is key. For a successful project, it’s important to timely clarifying expectations, understand divergencies of interests, discuss common solutions. By communicating early (especially if it’s bad news), and communicating often, I prevent misunderstanding spiralling into conflicts. I consider being well organised a real superpower. Having control of my life and my work, gives me great confidence that I will achieve my goals. But it’s not just that: by planning my day at work, I get a lot more done in a smaller amount of time, and that’s always great value for any organisation. One thing I particularly focus on is concentrating the difficult tasks at the time of the day where I have more energy, while leaving the mundane administration work to later in the day when I am running low on battery. Understanding people and business is my real passion. Through experience (and mistakes) I learnt that we all have different drivers, and that we all think differently. By understand what these drivers are, I help my organisation to achieve a shared success. Whether it’s people or businesses, a good interaction or negotiation is best achieved if there are benefits for all parties; by understanding what everyone wants, I help achieving good business.

While space has been my passion from my childhood to my studies, my career in space just started in 2022, after completing the Southern Hemisphere Space Study Program organised by the International Space University and University of South Australia. In between, I had a 15-year career in business development and strategy, stakeholder engagement, networking, team building and leadership. My ambitions after delivering the Australian Space Park project in my current role, is to progress my space career combining it with my previous leadership experience in an organisation that aims to make a positive difference in the world. And beyond!