If you have gifted students pursuing STEM majors, here’s your chance to change some lives: STEM Takes Flight offers paid summer research opportunities for our students at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton and at its Wallops Island Flight Facility. The pioneering program enters its tenth session next summer and applications are due March 18.
The 10-week 2024 program starts June 3, and VCCS students and recent graduates will have the opportunity to conduct real-world research alongside NASA engineers, learning valuable job skills and making professional contacts that could last a lifetime. Some of the STEM Takes Flight students that we’ve met in past years have gone on to work for NASA.
Stem Takes Flight is a program of the Virginia Space Grant Consortium.
Ahmad
Students who participated in the program last summer were enthusiastic. “This was an incredible opportunity to be in an environment and do things that just don’t seem possible when you’re a student in class,” said Virginia Peninsula Community College engineering student Nike Lin. That’s Lin and her NASA Mentor Miko Coleman above in a climate controlled clean room at the Langley Research Center, testing equipment to inspect cameras and lenses for probes to be sent to the Moon and Mars.
“Virginia Community College students bring a contagiously high level of passion with them,” said Coleman. “We love this level of energy as it leads to synergetic creativity in the feedback loop which guides us to creative and effective engineering solutions.”
NOVA engineering student Raiyan Ahmad worked on a project to use machine/computer learning to improve the safety of flight systems. “I was impressed that everyone around me was incredibly smart, but incredibly approachable at the same time. They didn’t look down on community college students and that was enlightening to see.”
Ovwagbedia
“I learned a lot about software coding, of course, but being at NASA also helped me learn to communicate better with my fellow interns and with our mentors, too,” said Brightpoint software engineering student Fiji Ovwagbedia. “I guess this environment helped be to become something of an extrovert.”
Arthur (right) and Piccolo
NASA research aerospace engineer Trey Arthur served as mentor to Germanna student Colleen Piccolo on projects to make flight data accessible and readable. “These internships help to bring in our next generation of researchers and engineers and these folks come from everywhere, not just the Ivy League,” said Arthur. “I got to network with a lot of people and this experience helped reinforce that computer engineering is something I’d like to pursue as a career,” said Piccolo.
Last summer’s Stem Takes Flight student researchers posed (below) for a “class photo” at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton:
Participants receive a stipend to help pay living expenses. The program is open to students at all of Virginia’s Community Colleges. Over the past nine years, 225 students from 16 of our colleges have participated.
Find out more.
