A parent working at NASA is a great advantage for entering tech not because they could open a door for you, but because they would help you creating a receptive

A parent working at NASA is a great advantage for entering tech not because they could open a door for you, but because they would help you creating a receptive mindset much before you'd actually start reading books. Or maybe it wasn't the case for you, but it definitely was for me. My father is a programmer, my mother a maths teacher. My mother's parents both were maths teacher, at different school levels. You can guess it was easy for me to have mathematical and computer concepts presented and explained every time I fancied them. I could develop and nurture my love for STEM much before it was a matter of actually reading books on my own. It's not mechanical, of course; my sister never particularly enjoyed maths and went on to become a nurse. That's fine, of course; but clearly the road would have been harder for me if I wasn't born in an environment which valued maths and science as naturally interesting. My mother's siblings have all finished the university, and so have my cousins on my mother's side (or are still going to the university). Among my father's siblings, he's the only one who finished the university, and coincidentally of my cousins on my father's side the only who finished university are my siblings and I. Of course I don't pretend this is statistically significant, but I think the real privilege with culture is not the money or somebody who makes it easier for you to get a job, but rather being born in an environment that stimulates your desire for culture.