GREENBELT, MD. — When NASA electronics engineer Robyn L. King tells the 10 summer interns he oversees at Goddard Space Flight Center that “the sky’s the limit,” it’s not just an empty idiom. Through a three-year collaborative research project that for the first time involves the space flight center and two HBCUs, orbit is a real-life potential destination for the microelectronics designs that the interns work on here each day. When prospective employers see the students’ NASA experience listed on their resumes, King predicts the employers will conclude the students gained meaningful research experience.
“They weren’t at a ‘busy work’ summer program that had a lot of fluff in it,” King says employers will deduce. “It was at least substantive.”
A Diverse reporter paid a visit to the students this summer and found them assembled in a room within Building 11 here at Goddard.
With laptops, the students were busy analyzing and trying to improve upon a digital library of microelectronic designs that could one day comprise the components of future spacecraft.
Their world is a highly technical one where they speak of things in terms of microseconds, converting signals from analog to digital, and of dealing with inputs, outputs and integrated circuits.
Laurence Womack, 20, a senior at Tuskegee who is majoring in electrical engineering, says one of the most interesting aspects of the internship is being able to work on digital software that can guide spacecraft.
Asked what he hopes to gain from the internship, Womack said, “really just a lot of networking and basic professional skills.” Networking definitely ranks at the top of the list of things students can do here at Goddard, where employees include an array of accomplished individuals. In addition to an occasional visit to other Goddard facilities, such as the space flight center’s Thermal Vacuum Chamber, meant to replicate the extreme cold and hot temperatures of space, the students are encouraged to attend lectures by various speakers on the Goddard campus. The other day the itinerary included Goddard-based astrophysicist John C. Mather, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006.
