What did you do last summer?
This is part of a series of Q&As with aerospace graduate students who had summer internships.
David Stanley, M.S. ’21, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. His adviser is Robyn Woollands. This past summer, he had a virtual internship with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was able to work remotely from both Nantucket, Massachusetts and Austin, Texas.
What did you do?
DS: I’ve been working on a system design project for autonomous computed cloud tomography from space –like a CT scan for clouds. During the internship I worked on autonomous scheduling for pointing a constellation of satellites at simulated cloud targets using mixed integer linear programming.
What did a typical day look like for you?
DS: A typical day meant spending a lot of time on working on Python code to process the simulated cloud positions for input into the MILP. This time was broken up by seminars that were regularly held by JPL and the occasional Webex meeting with my mentors.
Who were your mentors on the project?
DS: I worked with Amir Rahmani, Federico Rossi, and Changrak Choi. Amir is the supervisor for the Maritime and Multi-Agent Autonomy Group and Frederico and Changrak are roboticists in the same group.
What was the most challenging aspect of the summer internship?
DS: Not being in person meant I didn’t have much time to engage with other interns or JPL staff. Communicating over slack and email just isn’t the same as picking someone’s brain in person.
What was the most rewarding aspect?
DS: Setting up the simulated cloud data and processing took up most of the internship, so it was frustrating not seeing any results for so long. In the second to last week, I was finally able to get results from my work and my mentors praised my progress which felt very rewarding.
What did you learn about science?
DS: I was worried during the internship that my work was too applied, but my mentors—especially Federico, reassured me that what I’m working on is important for providing tools to cloud scientists. Science can’t be done without the tools to enable it.
What did you learn about yourself?
DS: I learned that I’m not as shy about public speaking as I thought. I had to give three presentations over my internship. I found that the more confident I became in the project the better I was at presenting about it.