Sheila Cummings is an inspiring entrepreneur and engineer. I met with her on September 2nd to talk about her career, her passions and goals, and how she has acclimated to the real world without sacrificing who she is. Her office is situated in the largest university research park in the country in Huntsville, AL. We had this conversation over lunch:
DB: You got your degree from UMD College Park. They have a great engineering program right?
SC: They do, they have a great engineering program. When I went there on a college tour I was amazed at the campus. There was this huge tank for training astronauts –
DB: The neutral buoyancy tank, yeah!
SC: And I was like, “Ok, where do I sign up!”
DB: Ok, so put yourself in my shoes: you just graduated with a B.S. in some STEM discipline… How do you go from there to owning your own company?
SC: Well, ironically I never dreamed of owning my own company but it was working for others that I was never quite satisfied. It was just like, ‘gosh I have so many ideas for how to do things better.’ My first few years in my career, I thought, ‘It’s just because I’m the lowest man on the totem pole’, and then after a while it was like, ‘I’m never going to have a voice in this organization’. So then I started looking for another opportunity where I could bring my ideas to the table and where I could contribute. So I joined a small business that allowed me to do that. And the first couple of years, it was just fabulous. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. I just happened to build a rapport with the management team and I did a lot of hard work to prove myself. Next thing you know, I’m VP running this major business unit. And I found along the way that there were certain things that I was really good at: the business side of engineering, the customer relations.
DB: Sounds like a lot of leadership skills.
SC: Yeah, and I was good at that. So it just all worked. And then of course, as organizations do change, new leadership came in and the dynamics were different and I was like, ‘OK, it’s time for me to do something different.’ Several friends of mine were like, “Aren’t you going to start your own [company]?’ I thought about that for a few months and I was like, ‘Hey I think I can do it.’
DB: That’s great! And that was 2009?
SC: Yep. And y’know I started with a plan and an approach and then the sequestration hit and I had to come up with a different plan. Learning to be dynamic and recognize you don’t have all the answers – I can quit and go home or I can change plans and find something different. Let’s look at this business a different way and see what we can make of it. So here we are five years later and things are going pretty well.
DB: A lot of people say that my generation will have three to five very different careers in our lives. Did you always know you wanted to be an Aerospace Engineer, and if not, how did you come to that decision.
SC: Well, actually...
I always wanted to be a fighter pilot. And even in high school I did ROTC and was prepared to go into the Air Force. I took the exam, I scored really well, and I went down to sign up with the recruiter, and he said to me, “…You’re going to make a great nurse.”
DB: Are you kidding me?
SC: No. And I just said, “Huh? You don’t understand. I have this plan, I want to be a pilot.”
“Well, y’know the Air Force needs nurses.” And I just said I can’t do that. I cannot be a nurse. I’ve done all this preliminary work. I don’t know if it was the recruiter I talked to that day or what. I thought, ‘There’s no way, I cannot be a nurse.’
DB: That must have been devastating.
SC: It was devastating, and my family said, ‘look you go to college, you get a degree and you’ll have your pick [of careers] when you come out, as long as you do well academically. ‘Ok, well I’m going to do engineering for aerospace.’
DB: It’s funny that you met that hurdle with the military because of, I’m assuming, your gender, and then you decide to go into the STEM fields with probably just as many barriers [for women]. Did you encounter any more things like that?
SC: Oh yeah. My junior year in college I met my now-ex-husband and was pregnant with my first child. And my propulsion professor told me that I should just go home and wait until after I had had my child and come back and try college later.
And I was like, ‘Oh my god! You just lit the biggest fire in me, are you kidding me?’
DB: Kind of did the exact opposite of what he intended.
SC: Yeah. In the early parts of my career, it was clear that I was in the man’s world and there were lots of men in leadership, there were no women in leadership at the organization I worked for anywhere except the secretaries. It became very apparent that structures were in place that were working against me. All of that contributed to me working for this small business where women were in leadership roles, where it was clear that I was respected for my contributions and I was evaluated fairly. That obviously shaped me as a leader of an organization and how I look at people and the opportunities that I give to others, and how I evaluate them. Ultimately it’s made me who I am today, and at some level it lights a fire in me.
DB: In all of your years of experience with gender-related injustice, what is something I can do as a man to open doors, or to not impede the way for women in my field?
SC: I think one of the things you can do is to make sure you’re treating everyone the same. Regardless of what role you have, the people you have the opportunity to interact with, whether they be employees or students or mentors or whatever, look at them the same. Treat them the same. Have an open mind and recognize that everybody is different and everybody brings value in different ways. If you can find a way to tap into people’s strengths, you’ll see that that is incredible. It is truly rewarding to see the individual strengths of the people on my team and to play those strengths together. It’s awesome when it all comes together. It’s what it ultimately is all about, is whether you can make that synergy work for what it is you’re working on. Making sure you’re treating everybody fairly. It’s easy to follow the stereotypes. Not that you intend to discriminate…
DB: …But you don’t check those predispositions that are put in your head.
SC: And they’re everywhere, yeah.
DB: I didn’t know that Space Camp was in Huntsville. I always thought that it was in Florida or something!
SC: Yep. It’s a great camp. Two of my kids have gone through the camp there.
DB: Lucky, lucky! How old are your kids?
SC: My oldest is going to be 20 in October, she’s a junior at UA Tuscaloosa; my middle son is seventeen, he’s a senior at Sparkman; and my youngest is a sixth grader, he’s twelve.
DB: So they’re all at different points in their development. That’s cool.
SC: My daughter had a very clear plan for what she wanted to do. She had known for a long time that she wanted to study journalism. In high school she laid out her courses to get to Alabama to go to the Journalism and Communications college. Over the years she’s developed an interest in politics so she’s looking at political science and law school. My son, he’s the total opposite. He’s like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’
DB: So if I were one of your children sitting across from you right now and you had this golden, uninterrupted moment to impart wisdom to them that they would take with them for the rest of their lives, what would you tell them?
SC: I would say find your passion and pursue it. Whatever it is. Pursue it with everything you have. If it’s art or sculpture, fine. Figure out a way to employ yourself, but pursue your passion. I wanted to be a fighter pilot, and I pursued that with vigor. When somebody put an obstacle in my way I found ways to maneuver around that obstacle and that ultimately created a path for me that I never would have envisioned I would have ever been on, but it’s been this journey and it’s been very rewarding for me. Find what you love and do it. And sometimes that’s the hardest part, [finding your passions]. But look at what you enjoy doing, look at what your interests are, and pursue them. My daughter has worked in underprivileged communities in mission work, internationally. She’s been to China; she’s been to Venezuela. What if you want to make a difference in those countries... you have to be involved in the policy, so I’m trying to show her how being in international policy and how a law degree will allow her to be in a position helping to implement those policies. Yeah, she could go and be a missionary… but an alternative would be to have a degree that allows you to work internationally. But if you don’t have any money, you can’t help people who don’t have any money.
DB: “Put your oxygen mask on before you put on your child’s.”
SC: Right.
DB: That’s something that’s very important to me. I have this, I wouldn’t call it guilt, but this acute awareness of disadvantage and inequality in the world and a compulsion to do something about it, as a lot of young people have in the world. It sounds like you’re advocating for, ‘Yes, you can do it the hard way, yes you can get your hands dirty, or you can affect policy, y’know, look at the big picture.”
SC: Right. Being active in our community is very, very important for me as a business owner, as well as for our employees. But it takes money to do that. Ultimately putting yourself in the position to where you have those resources or you can raise the resources to get involved and make a difference. Sometimes you have to look at … how do you make the biggest difference with people who don’t have clean water? Is it, ‘do you build dams?’, ‘do you bring them the technology that allows them clean water?’, or ‘do you just ship in water?’.
You have to look back at the fundamental problem, how do you help these people to be sustaining in the long term?
DB: This sounds like an engineer’s point of view.
(Both laugh)
DB: That’s funny, I’ve been more and more aware of the black-and-white thinking of kids like me. These eco-anarchists and anti-corporate liberals, partisan zealots (and I am one of them admittedly) but I’m increasingly aware that we’re not seeing the whole picture, we’re not seeing the grayscale, we’re not seeing the in-between-the-lines.
SC: And that’s natural because it takes a certain amount of experience to see the whole picture, and it takes exposure to see the [whole] problem. But the good thing about your generation is that you force others to reexamine their position, re-think their decision, what it is that they think is right or wrong. So we all help each other see the picture at a different angle or different perspective and ultimately come up with a better solution, then I think we are all better off.
DB: Are you saying that our naïveté has a place in life? (Both laugh) That’s reassuring. It’s not completely useless. Good.
Sheila Cummings is CEO of Cummings Aerospace in Huntsville, AL.