When Dr. Gay Jane Perez was a kid, she never thought that she would grow up to be a decorated physicist, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a leader in the space economy, as well as the director general of the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA).
“Although much, much younger, I did think about being an astronaut. But not so seriously, just in a way that was, ‘Oh! It would be cool to be an astronaut! I want to be an astronaut.’ But what course would you take to be an astronaut? There’s no Filipino astronaut,” she shared. “So it’s just one of those things that will cross your mind but you don’t have a pathway to get it.”
Perez didn’t even attend a science high school. As a student of the Universidad de Santa Isabel in Naga City, she grew up seeing lawyers, accountants, and doctors at career fairs, not scientists. Her school also focused on developing well-rounded leaders, writers, and public speakers.
Even if she was an active student leader herself, she felt like those skills were her weaknesses, so she gravitated to math instead of words. While her friends were winning extemporaneous speaking competitions, she was winning math olympiads.
She chose to major in physics — the science with the most math, she thought then — at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman after the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) offered a scholarship and incentivized the science course.
