What started as simply stargazing with her Girl Scouts troop as a 7-year-old in New Mexico has since turned into a career at NASA, IBM, Apple and Dell for Sylvia Acevedo. Most recently, in May, she was named the CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, the organization she belonged to growing up. Her mission: to ensure STEM learning is a part of every young woman's life. "I had an 'aha' moment when I was a young girl and my troop leader saw me looking at the stars," Acevedo tells CNBC Make It. Sylvia rockets "Later on, when we were choosing our badges, she encouraged me to get my science badge," she recalls. And the rest is history. Despite being one of the few girls in her science and math classes through grade school, Acevedo says she was "able to persist" because she realized she was both interested and good at the subjects.

Girl Scouts gave me that early confidence of being competent to talk about money, talk about what I deserve and not taking no for an answer. Sylvia Acevedo Girl Scouts CEO

But it wasn't easy to pursue this passion: When Acevedo told her high school guidance counselor she wanted to go to college and become an engineer, she wasn't taken seriously. "Girls like you don't go to college," Acevedo recalls her counselor saying, laughing and adding, "girls aren't engineers." Acevedo responded with what she calls her "Girl Scout confidence": "If I can cook, I can be an engineer." After getting her bachelor's degree in engineering at New Mexico State University, Acevedo landed her first job as a rocket scientist at NASA. She developed algorithm programs and analyzed data for the Voyager space program in 1979. When she learned it would take decades for NASA to develop the right materials for the next Solar Probe mission to get close to the sun, she left to attend graduate school.