When US forces withdrew from Afghanistan, among the thousands trying to get out through the Kabul airport was a 15-year-old girl named Florence Pouya.

Today, five years later, Pouya is a rising junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. 

Pouya had grown up with eight siblings in the western city of Herat. She was first turned on to tech when she was 12 years old and heard about the Afghan Girls’ Robotics Team.

“When I first saw the news about the seven girls in the national team who would travel around the world, participate in the competitions [and] raise the flag of our country, I was so amazed,” she said. “I always would admire their work, talent and bravery, because in Afghanistan, it was such a big thing to do. Being the first girls to do something in engineering and STEM is just something very huge.”

Pouya wanted to be part of it, so when spots on the team opened up, she was one of the several hundred adolescents who applied.

“They selected seven members for the national team, and I’m really happy that I was one of them,” she said. “I think my life began after that.”

For a year, she was trained in robotics, and at age 13, she took her first international trip to a competition in Dubai. It was an exciting life, and public figures described the team as representing Afghanistan’s future. 

Until the Taliban came back.

Immediately, the robotics team was in the crosshairs of the extremist group.

After the team and staff tried and failed twice to enter the Kabul airport, their co-founder, Roya Mahboob, made headway with foreign officials, and they were flown to Qatar.

For almost two years, the Qatari government hosted the girls as they took classes and continued the robotics team’s activities, now with Pouya as captain. Until, one by one, each member left for a US college on a Qatari scholarship.

Eventually, Pouya was accepted to MIT, where she’s been able to pursue a new passion.

“When I was introduced to the idea of being an astronaut or working in space or building rockets,” she said, “that was like when you find your thing, and there’s not an ounce of doubt in your body, you’re so sure about it. That was my feeling toward being an astronaut.”

It’s hard to believe how much has changed for Pouya and her country in just five years.

Today, she talks regularly to friends in Afghanistan, even though it’s difficult to hear girls and women describe what it feels like to be confined to the house, unable to go to school or work or even the beauty salon.

It’s a situation few of her peers in the United States understand.

“ It just makes me sad sometimes that there are so many people around the world, or in the US, some of my friends, who don’t even know where Afghanistan is,” she said. “They don’t even know there is a country on this planet where girls are not allowed to go to school. There’s no school open in the whole entire country for girls after sixth grade.”

Pouya wants to do what she can to help her loved ones and her country, but she knows it’s best not to agonize over what she can’t change.

“I think the best I could do now is focusing on my school and my career and doing internships, gaining more experience, being a good leader,” she said.

Last summer, she interned in San Diego at the defense technology company General Atomics. 

This summer’s internship is at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Her good friend Shawn VanDiver, founder of AfghanEVAC, dropped her off at her dorm at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The two met in Qatar when VanDiver was introduced to the Afghan robotics team, and they reconnected in the US a few years later. He’s now one of the most outspoken advocates for Afghan refugees in the US.

“We’re excited to be heading to Caltech, which is insane,” he said. “It makes me so proud, in that I get to be a casual observer of this young woman who has faced extraordinary odds and is just doing it.”

Weeks after the drop-off at her dorm, Pouya said how cool it was to be part of the team building a helicopter for Mars.

“There are so many things that you would have to consider when you build a Mars helicopter,” she said, “because, you know, the gravity on Mars is very different than on Earth.”

Pouya has never let go of a founding goal of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team: to prove to the world what an Afghan girl can do. 

She has many more years of study and competitive hurdles ahead, but while the Taliban forces women to stay home, she’s on track to blast out of Earth’s atmosphere.