NASA Interns!
Kylie Akiyama: Spring 2022
Summary of my experience:
My summer as a NASA intern has been absolutely extraordinary. Although I had to work
remotely, that did not limit the amazing projects I was able to be a part of or the incredible people I was
able to meet. I was part of the Space Life Sciences Training Program (SLSTP) at NASA Ames, which
allowed me to become close with a tight-knit group of interns who inspired me and never failed to make
me laugh. Working with my mentor was eye-opening as well because not only was I able to learn a lot
about science from him, I was also able to learn about mission operations and the internal workings of
being a NASA contractor or civil servant. A series of lectures provided both through Ames and SLSTP
introduced me to very interesting people, taught me a great deal of cool science, and helped me figure
out more about the career path I want to take. It was really amazing to see the inner workings of such
an inspiring organization and learn from some of the researchers that work there. The work I was doing
also made me feel involved in the mission and like I was actually contributing to something important. I
learned a lot of new skills, especially on the data analysis side, and a great amount about space biology
in general. The one limiting factor was that I was unable to work in person to make face-to-face
connections and do wetlab work, which I am more accustomed to. However, as I said before, I was still
able to learn many new skills because of this and had a great time.
Matthew Yu: Summer 2022
In my NASA internship, I designed and tested an online ML model pipeline for autonomous systems, and cut consecutive training time by 40%. I also proved the deep learning model effectiveness with sentiment analysis test data set, achieving a 98.6% accuracy. I want to take my mentor for providing the time and energy to help me understand these new concepts and guiding me through building new systems. I thoroughly enjoyed the internship and I learned a lot outside of the concepts at school.
Diego Silva: Summer 2021
I have completed the remodeling of the VIKING-400 aircraft brake master cylinder CAD assembly
– I started and finished the remodeling of the VIKING-400 front landing gear CAD assembly
– Completed the modeling of a few support brackets within the VIKING-400 fuselage which required special sheet metal properties in the model in order to conduct FEA (finite element analysis) on in the future.
– My intern buddy and I successfully carried out our exit presentation yesterday morning which was a culmination of our work this past summer (virtually delivered).
I had a great time during my summer here at Ames.
Mark Hagiwara: Summer 2020
Throughout 13 weeks of internship at NASA Armstrong, I worked for the FOSS team as
a thermal analysis engineer. My primary task is to figure out the appropriate cooling method for
the laser unit inside the FOSS system. The task was challenging and required strong knowledge
of heat transfer. This internship was all about the learning experience in both hard and soft
skills. As technical skills, I learned about the basics of heat transfer including conduction,
convection, and radiation. Teammates in the FOSS team were always willing to help, and those
bits of advice from full-time engineers were extremely helpful in order to investigate our problem
further. As a soft skill, the biggest skill I improved was the presentation skill. Besides the daily
meeting every morning, we tried to communicate with everyone in the FOSS team, and we
presented our ideas with PowerPoint slides once a week. That process was very important
because this experience also made us improve our presentation skills. Unfortunately, we have
not finished our thermal analysis for the uFOSS within my internship period yet; however, my
colleagues will keep working on the task, and hopefully, they can finish their design sometimes
soon. I finished my exit presentation on Tuesday, September, 22nd, and I got a lot of great
feedback from people who participated in my presentation. That was another valuable
experience I had. To conclude, this internship was a great opportunity to learn real engineering,
and I was pleased to be a part of the FOSS team. This internship would not be great as right
now without any help from people around me; therefore, I appreciate the help from everyone in
the FOSS team, mentor, colleagues, intern coordinator, and program coordinator from CaSGC.