Driving a Mars rover takes something of a unique mindset. There are the technical skills of course, but I found a big part of my training was learning how to operate in high-stress environments. It’s not uncommon for a room full of colleagues to be waiting on you to figure something out, and if you make the wrong decision a two-billion-dollar asset on the surface of Mars is at risk.

Early in my training, I would get physically tense in these situations. I’m used to making important technical decisions at work, but the immediacy of being “on shift” is something I’ve never fully experienced before. Traditionally, most of my big design decisions are based on discussions with various subject matter experts and approval by more senior engineers. On the other hand, on an operations shift it’s mostly up to you and your colleagues in the room to sort things out, and you only have a few hours to do it in. It can be intense.  

There were one or two memorable times where I panicked in these situations. I got caught up in the fact I wasn’t sure how to do something and ended up costing everyone valuable time and effort. What I later learned was that I didn’t need to panic. If I would have just slowed down and thought about the situation, I could have figured out the problem and saved everyone lots of trouble.

“Slow is steady, and steady is fast” is a phrase I came across during a wilderness first aid class. The general idea is that if you rush while trying to administer first aid, you’re probably going to screw something up and cause more issues down the line. I’ve adopted the phrase as a more general mantra for how to go through life and found it to be immensely useful even in situations that don’t involve life and death, including on Mars.