Jasmine didn’t join the United States Marine Corps for herself. She joined for her family.

Growing up in Dallas, Texas, she understood early that military service could open doors for the people she loved, including helping her parents become U.S. citizens — and made a decision that most 18-year-olds never face. Her older brother, seeing what she was willing to do, refused to be left behind. They left for boot camp together.

“If nobody does this,” Jasmine says, “how am I going benefit my parents in the long run?”

The plan worked. Her family’s circumstances stabilized, in no small part because of her and her brother’s service. Her brother has since transitioned out. Jasmine worked as a satellite communications transmission operator, extending her service until this year.

For four years, Jasmine was the communications backbone for units that included service members like her classmates at Workshops for Warriors — setting up satellites and antennas, managing Wi-Fi and telephone systems in the field. She was also, frequently, the only woman in the room.

“Being around a whole lot of males,” she says, “I’m like, okay, well, ‘what do you got that I don’t?’ I’m clearly here for a reason.”

That comfort with being the only woman in a room built for men is what led her to Workshops for Warriors’ CNC machining program. She found the program through SkillBridge, but her reasons for choosing it were strategic. Her husband works at SpaceX. She already had satellite expertise from her time in the Marines. Adding precision machining to her résumé meant she could pursue either discipline at the company’s facility near their home in Los Angeles.

“I could play both teams,” she says, “satellite and machining.”

She came in with more background than most. In high school, Jasmine had been in a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) program that introduced her to SolidWorks and 3D printing. But what she encountered at Workshops for Warriors was different in scale and stakes — not a classroom printer producing a plastic prototype, but a CNC machine producing parts held to tight tolerances, parts that go somewhere, that do something.

“Not only am I combining my intellect,” she says, “but I’m also combining my creativity and putting those together — bringing everything down to a precise measurement and a precise tolerance.”

Her biggest breakthrough came during the coding phase of the program, when she had to learn to write the instructions that tell the machine how to move. Something clicked.

“It’s like reading zeros and ones,” she says, “but other people can’t read that because only I understand that.”

That sense of mastery — quiet, earned, precise — runs through everything Jasmine does.

Her career plan is a long game, and she’s been playing it for years. Workshops for Warriors is the latest move on that board — a place where her technical background, her military discipline, and her appetite for challenge have found a home.

She’s also aware of what it means to be the rare woman in the room. Manufacturing has a history of women stepping into the breach when the world needed them — and then being pushed back out when it didn’t. Jasmine doesn’t think much about that history. She thinks about the challenge in front of her.

“I’m not as strong as you,” she says, “but I promise you, I could get stronger. That’s not hard.”