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I got a nasa internship1/18/2024 ![]() ![]() I got there and interviewed with a few different people. I thought this was a bit weird timing, but as an established aerospace research lab I put on my best clothing, still an over sized suit, and went to interview. Note: Margaret Hamilton is a Presidential Medal of Freedom winning bad-ass programmer that you can read more about here! Their achievements are numerous and you can read their Wikipedia page here. In case you have never heard of Draper, they designed the Inertial Measurement Unit, the Apollo flight computer, and were the scene of the famous picture, shown below, of Margaret Hamilton next to Apollo’s code printed out. That was until I got an email halfway through the summer asking me to interview at Draper. Of those, I got several rejections but no interviews. I drafted a big list of more than 60 companies and dutifully went through this list apply to each one. Buoyed by my success at obtaining one at NASA, I decided to apply only to aerospace companies. In my freshman year, I applied for more summer internships. I had never considered working on weather modeling before but when a NASA internship is available to take it! This internship turned out to introduce me to programming and more specifically MatLab, a programming language that is frequently used in engineering and that I have used every year since then. More specifically on determining the skillfulness of a weather model he was developing. The second PI offered me an internship under him working on weather modeling. Two days later I got a phone call, again from GISS, but this time from a different PI. I was right to be worried because in the end, he got the position. I was worried at that point because he is a lot smarter than me. As it turns out he was interviewing with the same PI. He was also interviewing there and thought he saw me when I was coming in. The next day in school, I was talking to a friend and he asked me if I interviewed at GISS the day before. I talked with a PI about his research and I thought it went pretty well. I put on my best clothing, an oversized suit, and went for the interview. It turned out, I brought enough to be asked to come in for an interview. I didn’t really expect much, because as a high school senior who would want me? What did I bring to the table? It would be nice not to have to move for the summer. I applied for 15 positions all around the country but made sure to apply to a few in NYC, where I lived. I applied online on NASA’s internship website OSSI, which you can find here. It was my senior year in high school and it started in the traditional way. My first internship was at NASA at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Note: if you read Chris Hadfield’s book (Canadian astronaut, commander of the ISS, player of David Bowie in space) You’ll get another tale of how life often deviates from the traditional paths we expect. so what do I bring to the table? Simple, none of my internships took the traditional path. They contain guidance from counselors or top-tier students and are often arranged into nice 7 item listicles. While writing this post I found myself asking, isn’t there enough posts on the internet that can fit into the category “How to get an internship”? Yes, there are. ![]() ![]() ![]() I figured I would write up my experiences with getting an internship. My GPA is about a 3.3, I don’t come from a school with a lot of name recognition, and yet I’ve come to work shoulder to shoulder with people from MIT and who have had perfect 4.0 GPA’s. One summer was spent as an intern at NASA, and the other two were spent at Draper. I’ve had three summer internships so far and this summer I have an REU lined up (Note: This coming fall I will be entering Grad school to begin my PhD). As I write this post, I’m about to finish my senior year studying aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo. ![]()
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