presented an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Florida Tech President John Nicklow
ABOVE VIDEO: Retired NASA Astronaut Joan Higginbotham offers her thoughts and advice to Florida Tech students and graduates.
BREVARD COUNTY • MELBOURNE, FLORIDA – Joan Higginbotham, one of just 355 people to ever fly on a space shuttle, has been an astronaut, a rocket scientist, an electrical engineer and a corporate leader. She is currently a business owner.
This exciting career path highlights another impressive skill of the Florida Tech alumna: the ability to build a working life of remarkable and varied achievements.
She is a master architect of a pathway that went, she freely admits, in unexpected directions.
“Almost everything that I planned for my life did not happen,” Higginbotham said in an interview at Florida Tech, where she served as keynote speaker at the university’s spring commencement ceremonies on May 4 and was presented an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Florida Tech President John Nicklow.
Higginbotham is a two-time Florida Tech graduate, earning her master’s degree in management in 1992 and a second master’s degree in space systems in 1996. She earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Each degree was a critical step along the way.
“I wanted the management degree because I had a technical undergraduate and I wanted that business aspect,” she said.
Similarly, on her way to becoming an astronaut, she earned the space systems degree. It was all about anticipation and preparation.
“I was prepared for wonderful opportunities that were presented to me and with my education, a lot of that attributed to what I learned at Florida Tech,” Higginbotham said. “I was able to take advantage of those opportunities.”
Those opportunities included an amazing 20-year run at NASA, including spending 13 days in space a part of Space Shuttle mission STS-116 to help build the International Space Station. And then a distinguished career in the private sector that included high-profile roles at Marathon Oil, Lowe’s Companies Inc., UTC Aerospace Systems and Collins Aerospace.
And in April 2022, she launched Joan Higginbotham Ad Astra, an aerospace consulting firm.
That success across industries was “because I got the skill set in both engineering, which gave me the ability to do the critical thinking, and then I got the business aspect from my management degree here at Florida Tech. So all of that – I wish I could say I was intelligent enough to plan my career, but I wasn’t. I was just able to take advantage of these wonderful opportunities that were presented to me.
She concluded, “I can’t say that the path has always been really easy and a straightforward one, but I would say whatever happens to you in life makes you the person you are.”
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