Experience
Thagard held a number of research and teaching posts while completing the academic requirements for various earned degrees.
In September 1966 he entered active duty with the United States Marine Corps Reserve. He achieved the rank of Captain in 1967, was designated a naval aviator in 1968, and was subsequently assigned to duty flying F-4 Phantom IIs with VMFA-333 at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina. He flew 163 combat missions in Vietnam while assigned to VMFA-115 from January 1969 to 1970. He returned to the United States and an assignment as aviation weapons division officer with VMFA-251 at the Marine Corps Air Station, Beaufort, South Carolina.
Thagard resumed his academic studies in 1971, pursuing additional studies in electrical engineering, and a degree in medicine; prior to coming to NASA, he was interning in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. He is a licensed physician.
He is a pilot and has logged over 2,200 hours flying time of which the majority was in jet aircraft.
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Famous quotes containing the word experience:
“Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation appled to life.”
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“Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of his enthusiasm, and there are now men,—if indeed I can speak in the plural number,—more exactly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible, that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest of sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.”
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“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)