"You must believe in yourself and allow your dreams to soar." --Shaesta Waiz.
During our quest to discover ordinary people who do extraordinary things, one of the first people we found was Shaesta Waiz. Her story is so inspiring that we were determined to track her down for the Extraordinariness Podcast. During the interview, we ask her about how she came to become the first female certified civilian pilot from Afghanistan and also discuss how, in 2017 ,she earned herself a world record as the youngest woman to fly solo in a single-engine aircraft around the world.
Shaesta was born in a refugee camp in Afghanistan, travelling to America in 1987 to escape the Soviet-Afghan war. One of 6 daughters, she assumed her future would lie in starting a large family at a young age. It wasn’t until she took her first commercial flight that her passion for aviation really took off and she decided to pursue an education and career.
“GIRLS NEED TO SEE LIVING AVIATION FEMALE ROLE MODELS”.
Shaesta took off on May 13 of 2017 [from Daytona Beach, Florida]. The journey was 145 days long, and was completed it on October 4 of 2017. Along the route, she coordinated multiple stops with other female role models to promote the importance of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, sharing her story to inspire hundreds of other women to reach their full potential. Launching the Dreams Soar initiative, she continues to inspire and empower women to pursue STEM related careers in response to the fact that women are hugely unrepresented in the aviation industry.
In this fascinating interview, Shaesta explains how she overcame adversity, stepped outside of her expected mould and created a future for herself that women, historically, from her culture, could only have dreamed of.
Listen to the full podcast here.
You can follow Shaesta and her other endeavours here.
Instgram: @shaesta.waiz
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