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Hi I’m Omar De Frias, I am the lead for the Integration Evaluation team for the Science
Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. So we basically manage the execution of the
budget for Science. Every time I’m asked the question, ‘hey, where do you work?’
I say, I work for NASA. Obviously, the first response is, ‘wow, really? And they’re
fascinated first because of what we do as an agency. I try to tell them, ‘and here’s
how I tie into the big picture. Here’s how we do what we do to make, you know, MSL and
Curiosity happen.’ I basically got recruited as part of the corporate
recruitment effort that NASA did in the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez and this was back
in 2004. I was dealing with a multitude of offers – I was dealing with IBM as a potential
hiring possibility and I was dealing with Kimberly-Clark and I ended up choosing NASA
because of the path I saw forward. I used to be a professional basketball player
in the Dominican Republic, where I had a chance to really hone in on the skills of teamwork.
It’s very important to be able to have a good diverse team you want people with different
backgrounds, you want people that have worked internationally.
The biggest thing on diversity on my part is always to put diversity and inclusion in
the workforce, so it’s not only about, hey let’s go ahead and hire people from different
races we’re building them to be the next leaders of our agency and I think NASA’s
done a good job on that.
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