Day 20 as a NASA JPL Intern on the Psyche Mission
Today was definitely a win in my books. The key highlights were
- ERG Mentorship Panel
- Leading a team specific meeting
- Getting to run a procedure on the Testbed
The ERG mentorship panel consisted of very awesome people from JPL who are part of the different employee resource groups. One interesting story that really stuck out to me was a woman who was in a very toxic team that she got placed on as soon as she graduated college. There was a lot of tension in her team and one of her teammates mentioned to her that the reason why he was 5 minutes late is because he mentally had to prepare himself in the car to get ready for the work day. The team ended up kicking her out from the project because they thought that she was the problem. Long story short, they used her as a scape goat because she was the youngest and newest woman on the team. This just comes to show that not every work place is perfect and it’s possible that I may encounter situations like that.
Leading the team meeting was probably the most nerve wracking part. Being the point person in the tool smiths team, it made me want to think about how can I make this team more organized? I thought about the things that I’ve learned in my software engineering classes like agile, continuous integration, and deployment. That’s something that I really want this team to have because it will allow me to put my skills to practice while making the tools group a lot more scalable. Another idea I proposed was hosting a weekly office hour similar to what I did with Josh to share any blockers, go over concepts, and do some planning. Everyone was onboard and I’m excited to make it happen.
Lastly, I got to finally have a testbed shift! I completed a power on/off procedure of the testbed with an awesome buddy who was is a testbed engineer. It was basically me powering on the brains of the spacecraft and sending a couple of commands and making sure everything was communicating with each other as it should. Lastly, I gracefully powered it off and I will hopefully get to share the activity report in tomorrow’s testbed meeting where we go over different AR’s! wahoo. Excited to review all my notes tomorrow. ❤
