In an interview for Passauer Neue Presse, Schoenenwald explained how she desired to become an astronaut when she was young, and read every space book available at the local library.

She recounted that the more she got older, the more she felt her goal was unrealistic, which led her to initially pursue a different career path and study what interested her.

She was a member of the laboratory of Tim Skern at the Max Perutz Labs research centre, where she became a scientific project lead.

[2][4] In 2016, she was chosen as one of 120 candidates in the early stages of the private spaceflight programme Die Astronautin, which at the time aimed to send the first German woman to the International Space Station by 2020.

[5] During the second year of her PhD programme, in 2017, she received funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to attend a course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.