Aerospace engineer shares her success story with students

A woman who spent 30 years working for aerospace companies and came of age in the 1940s, when very few women pursued that field, shared her experiences with eighth-grade students at Roosevelt Middle School on Thursday.

Judith Love Cohen said she was one of eight women to graduate in a class of 800 engineering students at USC in 1957.

She began to dream big at age 10 when she started learning about astronomy and could picture herself someday studying cosmic rays.

However, the world around her led her to believe that interesting career choices were left up to men to pursue.

“Girls didn’t do these things. The only time I saw a woman doing anything interesting — I had a math teacher who was a woman. So I decided, OK, I’ll be a math teacher,” Love Cohen said.

While she was at USC, she fell in love with electrical engineering, and her passion ultimately set her on the path to create guidance systems for NASA and work on the Hubble Space Telescope.

“I wound up actually being able to do the thing I wanted when I was 10 years old,” she said.

She and her husband, David Katz, also publish illustrated books tailored to young female students, with titles such as “You Can Be a Woman Engineer,” and “You Can Be a Woman Botanist.”

As a member of the Society of Women Engineers, Cohen said she learned that as she has made the rounds to schools to share her story, she has made a greater effort to target younger female students in elementary schools rather than those already enrolled in college.

“By the time you get to college, it’s much too late because you haven’t had the math or science that you would need and, therefore, you’re not prepared to really study engineering,” she said.

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Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com

Twitter: @kellymcorrigan