Why am I qualified to write this?
As I write this post, I’m about to finish my senior year studying aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo. I’ve had three summer internships so far and this summer I have an REU lined up (Note: This coming fall I will be entering Grad school to begin my PhD). One summer was spent as an intern at NASA, and the other two were spent at Draper. My GPA is about a 3.3, I don’t come from a school with a lot of name recognition, and yet I’ve come to work shoulder to shoulder with people from MIT and who have had perfect 4.0 GPA’s. I figured I would write up my experiences with getting an internship.
Isn’t this type of Post Overdone?
While writing this post I found myself asking, isn’t there enough posts on the internet that can fit into the category “How to get an internship”? Yes, there are. They contain guidance from counselors or top-tier students and are often arranged into nice 7 item listicles. so what do I bring to the table? Simple, none of my internships took the traditional path.
Note: if you read Chris Hadfield’s book (Canadian astronaut, commander of the ISS, player of David Bowie in space) You’ll get another tale of how life often deviates from the traditional paths we expect.
My Internships and How I Got Them
My first internship was at NASA at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). It was my senior year in high school and it started in the traditional way. I applied online on NASA’s internship website OSSI, which you can find here. I applied for 15 positions all around the country but made sure to apply to a few in NYC, where I lived. It would be nice not to have to move for the summer. I didn’t really expect much, because as a high school senior who would want me? What did I bring to the table?
It turned out, I brought enough to be asked to come in for an interview. I put on my best clothing, an oversized suit, and went for the interview. I talked with a PI about his research and I thought it went pretty well. The next day in school, I was talking to a friend and he asked me if I interviewed at GISS the day before. He was also interviewing there and thought he saw me when I was coming in. As it turns out he was interviewing with the same PI. I was worried at that point because he is a lot smarter than me.
I was right to be worried because in the end, he got the position. Two days later I got a phone call, again from GISS, but this time from a different PI. The second PI offered me an internship under him working on weather modeling. More specifically on determining the skillfulness of a weather model he was developing. I had never considered working on weather modeling before but when a NASA internship is available to take it! This internship turned out to introduce me to programming and more specifically MatLab, a programming language that is frequently used in engineering and that I have used every year since then.
Draper
In my freshman year, I applied for more summer internships. Buoyed by my success at obtaining one at NASA, I decided to apply only to aerospace companies. I drafted a big list of more than 60 companies and dutifully went through this list apply to each one. Of those, I got several rejections but no interviews. That was until I got an email halfway through the summer asking me to interview at Draper.
In case you have never heard of Draper, they designed the Inertial Measurement Unit, the Apollo flight computer, and were the scene of the famous picture, shown below, of Margaret Hamilton next to Apollo’s code printed out. Their achievements are numerous and you can read their Wikipedia page here. Note: Margaret Hamilton is a Presidential Medal of Freedom winning bad-ass programmer that you can read more about here!
I thought this was a bit weird timing, but as an established aerospace research lab I put on my best clothing, still an over sized suit, and went to interview. I got there and interviewed with a few different people. Most of them were working on projects directly related to aerospace engineering. The final person I interviewed with though wasn’t. He was a programmer. My resume had been passed around, and on it I mentioned that I knew MatLab, Arduino (C/C++), and Python. Programming, which I was first exposed to at NASA, was the topic of our conversation.
We talked for a few minutes, and at the end of the interview he pulled up a data analysis problem on his screen and asked me how I would solve it. He hinted towards a computer vision answer but I ended up using some basic calculus concepts to solve it. I found the question was interesting because it didn’t feel like your standard interview question but I’ll get back to that later. They told me that all the people who interviewed me would decide if they wanted me and then I would get to choose between them, if I was made an offer. A few weeks later I got an offer from two different people at Draper, an aerospace engineer and the programmer. I was ecstatic, until I read the rest of the email. It turns out I had accidentally applied for a Co-Op position durring the school year, not a summer internship. My school does not require Co-Op’s so do I take a semester off or do I turn down this offer?
I took a third path. I emailed them back saying who I’d prefer to work for, the programmer, but that I didn’t realize this was a Co-Op. Was there anyway I could push this off to the next summer? I was expecting them to say no. To my surprise I got an email from the person I wanted to work for saying, while we cant guarantee a position will be open then, email me directly in January and if there’s a position open we can move from there. I did email him and ended up getting a summer internship at Draper. I liked interning for him and the atmosphere at Draper so much that I interned there again my junior year. This year I was asked back again but with grad school on my horizon I decided not to go back and take an REU instead.
Later I found out that the weird interview problem from earlier, was a large factor in why I was allowed to change from a Co-Op to a summer internship. It didn’t feel like a standard interview question because it wasn’t. It was an active problem he had been working on right before the interview and it was giving him some trouble. He wasn’t expecting me to solve it but because I was able to come up with an elegant solution he was impressed.
Summary of advice
Ok, in respect to tradition, here’s a 7 item listicle of things you should take away from this post.
- Be Flexible – None of my internships have been directly doing aerospace engineering, yet they all taught me important skills that I have used in my research.
- Apply Early, Apply Often – It’s never too early to apply for a position, and you should apply even if you aren’t the perfect candidate, the worst they can say is no.
- Make Your Own Luck – Being lucky is nice and I’ve benefited from being lucky plenty of times, but always try to expand on your luck by working hard.
- Learn More Math – As an engineer, math is the topic your entire career is built on. The better your math foundation, the better you will do.
- Employers can Often be Flexible with You – Employers are often willing to work with you and your schedule,as long as you give them enough advanced notice and are reasonable with your request. Again the worst thing they can say is no.
- Learn to Code – Today’s world depends on digital systems, and learning to code will open up doors you couldn’t imagine. As an engineer, in class you will be exposed to it as an extremely powerful calculator, but don’t stop there. Code is an extremely powerful tool that will allow you to automate a large chunk of your work.
- Think on Your Feet and Never Stop Hustling
If you want more Gereshes
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