Meet Summer Williams: Aerospace engineer by day, Houston Texans cheerleader by weekend.
Williams is a 25-year old aerospace engineer for the Jacobs Engineering Group, which is NASA's main scientific support contractor. Williams, a small-town Kansan, is an assistant project manager on the group that figures out how to keep the international space station habitable.[...]
"There was a girl I knew who went to a top state university and whose aspiration was always to be a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader," she said. "I remember thinking, 'How can that be your lifelong dream?' "
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"I just always wanted to be smart," Williams said. She definitely was that. Her dad's a mortician, and her first dream job was to be a forensic pathologist. Then her ninth grade science teacher had her class watch Apollo 13 and she became "very, very curious about the brains on the ground."
Every math and science elective her high school offered, Williams took. Her senior year, she wrote gobs of essays, underwent a two-day observation at problem-solving and group work, and won a $10,000 scholarship from Cessna. She went to Wichita State, got that aerospace engineering degree and didn't watch much football. "I studied a lot," she said.
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That first year Williams was in Houston, Jacobs had a family day at AstroWorld, a now torn-down amusement park. She went with some co-workers and when they saw an advertisement at Reliant Stadium trumpeting cheerleader tryouts, Williams joked about trying out so she could finally see an NFL field.
"That was it," she said. "No one ever talked about it again."
Until a year later, when one of her colleagues sent her a link to the 2005 tryouts. He and another co-worker had decided the best way to meet girls was for Williams to become a cheerleader. They'd buy her lunch, once a week for a year, if she'd try out.
"I stood on that line with 1,000 gorgeous women and I called them and said, 'You're going to owe me sushi every week," she said. But then she somehow got whittled into the half-cut group. Then the 75 that got the two-week rehearsal audition. She went to the personality interview in a suit, carrying her rocket scientist resume. She got picked.
And she was totally mortified, this woman with a pilot's license, to tell her colleagues. "I didn't want people to lose any respect for me," Williams said. "There is this perception about what a cheerleader is."