Day 4 as a NASA JPL intern
hoowee baby. I thought yesterday was a huge learning day?? Today I felt like my IQ increased by like 10 points. Honestly don’t know what my actual IQ is nor do I want to know because I’m kinda scared to know. But the day started out pretty awesome because I got to be part of my team’s Testbed daily tag up meeting. My lovely lead introduced me to the entire team and even made me go through my website in front everyone which I was a little embarrassed because I absolutely hate my personal website. However, I do plan to revamp it this weekend to make it a little less cringe. Next, my manager hosted a circuits and schematics workshop which I found super interesting. Sometimes I just wanna be able to look at a circuit schematic and know what the heck is going on but I think it’s going to take a little bit of time before that happens. But I got to hear Ohm’s law again and it took me back to my circuits class with my favorite professor ( shoutout Kev Ryan). My manager also showcased a multimeter and it’s different functions which I thought was really cool. I need to rewatch the workshop and reinforce some concepts a little bit but I definitely plan to do a little self teaching on some circuits + systems and data acquisitions knowledge either after work or during the weekends. I also plan to brush up on some embedded systems and intro to aero as well as a python personal project. merp. very ambitious I know but I’ll take it one day at a time. Right after, I had a division 34 meeting which is the autonomous system which includes missions like Psyche and the Mars 2020 Helicopter which is pretty badass. I got to see the faces of the other division 34 interns which was really nice. It’s like the first day of college when you’re doing all these ice breakers all over again and I genuinely enjoy it haha. During lunch time, I got to attend a NASA hosted women in STEM virtual forum which featured Swati Mohan was a Mars 2020 Guidance & Controls operation lead. She basically walked us through her role in the mission and went over general information that I loved hearing about. She also showed that video of the landing with footage from the mission control room and people celebrating the success and it’s one of my favorite videos and I literally tear every time I see it. I can’t even imagine how amazing / scary / rewarding it must have been to be in that room on that day. I really want to experience being in that room for a mission in the future. ~~~~~~~MANIFESTING IT~~~~~~~~~ So then the real learning began when I had a learning session with the software dev student intern/ full time student worker on the team who will unfortunately be leaving. We went over testbed tools he created and I will soon be making as well and I learned so much from this man in a matter of 2 hours and actually asked questions which made me understand the mission and testbeds so much better. He answered all of my general questions and he was able to explain it so well that I was able to reiterate it back to him and that was such a rewarding moment for me because I honestly didn’t do that in my last internship and would just idk nod. But thanks to my old mentor Manny Gonzales from Lockheed Martin Space, he taught me the skill of regurgitating knowledge when it’s being explained to me because it helps me understand it and reinforce the concepts. Thank you Manny ❤. My notes from the session are kinda all over the place but I’ll be rewriting everything tomorrow morning so hopefully the knowledge doesn’t dissappear when I’m sleeping. Right after, I had a tag up with my team lead. In order to be fully transparent to her about what I’ve learned so far, progress ive made, and some action items I’ll be completing within the next week. I felt really confident about what I’ve learned so far and felt really good presenting it. She gave some feedback and some additional knowledge on what I had in my slides was really nice. She’s really supportive of me wanting to get into more hardware which I’m incredibly excited for. I’m also requesting a new laptop??? hehe. Back to mac I go. Just because it’s going to be easier for creating the testbed tools. I also get to complete a cleanroom certification course which is going to be interesting. Presenting my knowledge went super well and I hope to do that every week with new content and progress. Overall, a great day and am excited to keep learning. Ad Astra baby!! peace!!
