Inside Job: Haritina Mogoșanu

I describe my role to non-engineers as…
Many people said to me that I have green thumbs. I do not have green thumbs. I have a manual (or a few) of how to grow plants and stick to it.

The part of my job that always surprises people is…
That there is such thing as biosecurity in space and people now take it seriously.

The best emoji to sum up me on a typical workday is…

The best thing I’ve introduced at my workplace/in my role is…
I've introduced celery (the crop) in Romania as part of a practical research project for my horticultural engineering degree.

In my role, I always challenge…
People who do not have a passion for what they do. When people love what they do, their achievements are off the charts.

At work, I’ve never been afraid to…
Speak in public.

In the past year, I’ve pushed boundaries by…
Trying to launch a batch of seeds into space on the International Space Station. It was very challenging as we had to send them to our partners abroad during Covid-19 and that proved harder than sending them to space.

I admire engineers who…
Invent all the things that make life easy for us here on Earth.

At school, teachers always described me as…
I’ve always been too shy to ask.

My luckiest break was…
I believe lucky breaks do happen because your attention is 100 percent on the objective you want to achieve. Opportunities start appearing not because they were not there before, but because now you are looking for them with all your energy. It’s what you put your attention into that really matters. Probably for me was when I got an internship at NASA Ames in 2014 in Planetary Protection (biosecurity in space). But I worked really hard for it and being there, learning about space and how to live in space was the culmination of a lifelong dream.

The bravest thing I’ve done to get where I am today…
I decided to lead and organise a training mission to the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah with the first New Zealand crew to ever train for Mars in 2012. When I thought of it, I had no clue how I was going to do it and no money. It was a huge success.

Best career advice I’ve received…
To show up and say: “I have a dream”. Then do the hard work.

I’d advise other people interested in my type of role to…
Never let anyone tell you who you are, what you should do, or ridicule your ideas. Follow your dreams and only choose to do what you absolutely love. When you do what you love it is like having a superpower. This is the only superpower you will ever need.

3 things I love about my job:

• Working in a team
• Problem solving
• Always working with the big picture

2 reasons why I chose to study engineering:

My grandfather was an agronomist and he knew how to create a farm from scratch. He was also a great leader of people, and he worked as a public servant for the Ministry for Agriculture in Romania in the 1930s. I grew up calling plants by their scientific names and with stories of him problem solving agricultural challenges and helping people. He was honest, competent, fair, trustworthy and diligent. In my eyes, he was the most knowledgeable person I have ever met. I wanted to be like him.

I love science and engineering is applied science, which for me is even better than science because you get to do something with all that knowledge.

1 thing I wouldn’t change about my workday:

I would not change a thing! I look forward to doing my work every day.

This article originally appeared in the December 2020 issue of EG magazine.