In late May, I flew to LA to start my fourth Summer there. I worked with the Falcon Engineering and Product Management team based in Hawthorne, California as a Graduate Engineer which essentially means that I was an intern with a degree that was treated as a full-time employee with a salary. Here are some bullet points about my work there:

• Assisted with Starship mass properties for a delta report & for training of a new hire
• Wrote a script connecting change in booster allocations per mission to automatic CAD changes
• Created dashboard to automatically summarize key program metrics in production and launch
• Created dashboard to automate a simplified manifest view for external use
• Consolidated knowledge across different mass properties programs to start a base of best practices
• Produced trade study for booster fleet strategies
• Led other side initiatives such as long-term S1/S2 part number storage and accurate reusability tracking

For this internship, I was able to obtain credits towards my graduate degree. I highly recommend that people talk to Career Services about this since it can save time and money.

Some fun things that I did while I was there include getting food with my California bestie, Alexa, who is a technician at Apex Technologies (she is really cool). She has also worked at SpaceX and Bombardier!!
We love discovering new places that serve things like a fluffy mango cake, dragonfruit boba, Korean cold noodles, or pork katsu like you see below. I also wandered around Manhattan Beach which has amazing weather, cute bookshops/stores, wonderful cafes, and more. The last picture is a duck that hangs out at the LA Fitness I go to there.

While in LA, I also tried to attend some networking events including one that involved a tour of JPL!! This was truly an amazing life experience that I shall show more of on my next post. 🙂