While in LA, I attended the Space Foundation’s New Generation Space Leaders: Dare Mighty Things Together Event at JPL. I got to meet and talk with some amazing people in the aerospace industry from across the country.
For the first half of the event, our group was taken on a tour around JPL, and I loved EVERY SECOND of it. They do similar tours for the public. If you are ever in the area, I highly recommend trying to book one. It was also great to see how much they encouraged photography throughout the tour!

Before I left to my internship, I spent some time with family. There are two things that we did in the Northeast Florida area that were super fun, and I highly recommend checking them out.

First, my parents, my boyfriend, and I went to a placed called All Fired Up in Winter Park (North Orlando sort of area) where we painted our own pottery! My parents and I painted a set of penguins to put in our garden. My boyfriend and I painted a cute little vase that we will plant sage in for our kitchen.

Secondly, my parents and I went shark teeth hunting! I also collected some cool shells and other types of fossils. In the Northeast Florida area, Ponte Vedra beach is an amazing hot spot for picking up shark teeth. You can walk onto the beach for free from the neighborhoods and find a good amount within an hour. This is a great idea for a date or just a nice vacation from the chaos of campus. There are also some amazing restaurants that you can walk into from the beach.

After all of these fun activities, I flew to LA for my fourth SpaceX internship! But more on that in the next post 🙂

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. 🙂