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I didn’t realize that I loved engineering and space until I had almost graduated from high school, but looking back, I can’t believe that it took me that long to figure it out.
Some of my earliest memories are of the sky. I remember looking up out of a backseat car window late at night, taking in the black sky and sparkling stars, watching the moon as it followed the car. I remember feeling overwhelmed, knowing nothing about the scene above me except for how small it made me feel. I would look around at my family in the car and wonder how it had happened that we existed under all of the huge blackness above.
And, in sixth grade, I remember researching Mars for a school project and being totally immersed in the information I uncovered. Again, the realization that this foreign planet actually, physically existed somewhere beyond the sky that I lived under every day captivated me. It seemed that a natural curiosity with space was lying low within me, just waiting for me to develop the vocabulary to put a name to it.
Growing up it seems that I decided on every career except one that involved space. I wanted to be a librarian, an author, a professional basketball player, a journalist. With no example of what a career in engineering or science looked like (coming from a humanities-minded family), I never really considered it, even though math and physics classes were consistently my favorites. It wasn’t until high school that I was officially exposed to any sort of engineering at all.
My small, all-girls high school was at the time developing two robotics courses, and I jumped at the opportunity to take the introductory one my junior year. As the college application process neared, I felt increasingly nervous about not knowing what I wanted to study. I was actively searching for a future but nothing was sticking. It was in the robotics class that I found myself engaged like never before, putting into practice the analytical tools and logical problem solving that I had learned, but never applied, in other classes.
I loved the engineering process. Failure was not only accepted, but, in cases where lessons were learned, welcomed, and I thrived in this hands-on, team-based environment. At the time, I was also taking a physics course that included a unit on simple space physics. While the robotics course let my mind and my hands fly free, allowing me a platform to develop and build whatever I could imagine, the physics class grounded me, giving me a basis to begin to try to comprehend—or at least appreciate in some tangible way—the (dis)order of space.
Thus, at some point during this junior year of high school, knee-deep in college brochures and lists of what seemed like a million possible majors, I just sort of came to an understanding: the excitement I felt in these classes was one that I could maintain, long-term, by studying engineering. I decided to attend Carnegie Mellon University and to study mechanical engineering with the hopes of working in the aerospace field. Every day in my classes at Carnegie Mellon I am pushed to work harder than I could have imagined the day before, but each time I hand in a problem set or present at a final design review, I know that I am a better engineer for having overcome a challenge that at first seemed to me truly insurmountable.
To be interning this summer at NASA, let alone at the historic Langley Research Center, is beyond anything I ever believed possible for myself. I am working in the Mechanical Systems Branch of the Engineering Directorate on a few projects to support the Mars Entry Descent and Landing Instrument 2 (MEDLI 2) project, a payload on the upcoming Mars2020 mission. One project involves developing and performing a thermal analysis on the pressure transducers embedded in the heat shield. My first goal was to size a heater to bring the transducers up to a safe power-up temperature before entry into the Martian atmosphere, and I am now working to optimize the standoffs and minimize the necessary heater power. I am also working on an aerodynamics project supporting ballistic range testing, where a small-scale model of the Mars 2020 flight vehicle will be shot out of a gun at supersonic speeds to gain insight into its entry dynamics. I am developing plots that predict the path of the model during the ballistic range test given certain parameters. These equations and plots can be used both to help set up a successful testing range and as a baseline for comparing test results.
I am so grateful to my mentor, Paul Banicevic, and to everyone at NASA’s Langley Research Center with whom I interact on a daily basis. While I expected the engineers, scientists, and administrators to be brilliant, I never anticipated them to be equally as friendly and willing to take time out of their busy days to help or advise me. I genuinely look forward to coming into work at NASA each day because to me, this is it. Nothing excites me more than the possibility of working as an engineer in the aerospace field, for a career in the field means working every day towards understanding the inherently unfathomable, solving problems on the largest scale possible. It means developing and building the space systems and spacecraft through which our universe will begin to open up to us, revealing the monumental mysteries that I have contemplated and chased for almost as long as I can remember. After years of searching, I’ve finally found my thing, and it’s awesome.
I wonder what my sixth grade self, researching the Martian atmosphere for that school project, would say if she could see me now, interning at NASA and working on a project that will fly to Mars in less than five years. More than anything, I think she’d be excited. Because though I’ve come a long way, there is still so much to learn, and even more to explore and discover along the way. They say that the sky’s the limit, but I’m starting to feel like the sky is just the beginning.