What is your next adventure?

I will be working at Vaya Space in Cocoa Beach, Florida, as a system engineer. Vaya is a hybrid rocketry company, which is not very common in the air space industry right now, and they're building a small satellite launch vehicle.

What about your next adventure are you most looking forward to?

I interned with Vaya Space over the summer, and I still intern with them now, so I actually know the team pretty well. I really enjoy the people there. They have dogs in their offices. I also loved being in Florida over the summer and since I've never really left Atlanta my entire life, I'm very excited to kind of leave the nest to explore. I love hot weather, and it's never cold. It's too cold for me right now.

Did you have any previous co-op, internship, or research experience in this area?

I interned for NASA. In the summer of 2022, I had just finished my sophomore year, and I worked at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama at the Advanced Concepts Office. I worked a lot in mission modeling and 3D printing. They were working on a cryogenic demonstration. Then in Spring 2023, I interned at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. I was a space suit engineering intern. I did a lot of CAD work, and I wrote some repair manuals.

While interning at Vaya, I was in charge of the environmental loads analysis while the vehicles were in storage, transit, or operation. I had to make sure that the vehicle was designed properly and that nothing would damage the vehicle in any of those phases and prevent it from successfully flying.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been the president of the Yellow Jacket Space Program (YJSP), which is the big collegiate liquid rocketry team here. It’s where I received a lot of my systems engineering experience. So, when I applied to work at Vaya over the summer, I was able to reference back to a lot of the experience I've had as president. I was able to learn a lot more about that field during my internships. It was a great experience to prepare me for my full-time position.

How did your educational experience at Georgia Tech help you to achieve your goals?

Honestly, I would say joining the YJSP was a big thing for me because when I joined, there were no in-person classes due to COVID. So, there was really no way to meet people and go beyond what was being taught in classes. I joined YJSP freshman year, and was able to dip my toes a little bit in all these different areas early on. Georgia Tech has so many different disciplines that you can work in, so you can figure out your interests. I also learned a lot just from being in good classes with good professors.

What advice would you give to an underclassman who would like to follow the same path?

Try everything and dig into each class. You never know what you are going to like. I didn’t come to Georgia Tech thinking I would be a systems engineer. I didn’t even know that existed. I didn’t know the different aspects of aerospace and rocketry. All I knew was that I liked rockets, and I thought they were cool. Say yes to all types of opportunities. Doing that helped me find my place. It is even beneficial to go into places where you're unsure of your interest because you’ll get that experience. You can figure out what you like about sitting at a desk and what you like about being out in the field. Those experiences help prepare you for when you graduate to go after a job that you know will be a perfect fit for you.