Guest Speaker Throughout the Years
One guest speaker that influenced me the most in the academy is probably Anthony Bagnulo from Tesla. After going to the University of Ottawa, he was inspired by a friend to go to Tesla Motors in 2012. After Tesla almost went bankrupt and some time looking for a job, Tesla came back and he became a part of it. He works in Manufacturing and Mechanical parts. If I learned anything from him, it's perseverance and have someone you look up to.
In addition, two more guest speakers that changed me were Shannah Withrow and Winne Kuag. They work with NASA and helped develop the Mars chopper, a new device that will make exploration easier on Mars. They both got out of school experiences with engineering. And they helped design and test aerospace equipment for NASA. If I got anything out of them, I learned that I should know my strengths, get out of my comfort zone, and communication is key.
Another speaker who influenced me was Joanne Baek. She's in chemical and biomolecular engineering. After high school she was accepted by Hopkins on the east coast. And she's currently, in 2021, working on gene expression. And two things I learned from her is that it's never too late to learn, and records are important when working on a project.
In my Junior year of high school a speaker whose name was Gary Richter. He worked at a lab in Livermore after getting a degree in astrophysics and nuclear physics. Later he joined the army as a scientist who looked at terrorist's blueprints and saw what they were building. He had experience with nuclear weapons and a warhead doesn't need to be big. And warheads could be made of uranium or plutonium. These elements are almost impossible to detect on smugglers, uranium could look like anything. And this speaker taught me that scientists don't need to be nerds.
In this talk, I had the privilege of meeting a former NASA engineer. He had worked in NASA during the Apollo missions. This talk helped combine the two things to get hired. You need to have manners, or be polite. In addition to that, you need to have technical enxperience.To get a good job, he stated it was important to have a healthy ratio of both.
In this talk, a person came from the company Yosemite Space. Her name was Kathleen Morse and her field is in Materials Science and Engineering. Her whole talk was about how she is trying to get today’s current technology into space. The processors within our phones haven’t been widely implemented in space yet other than the Mars helicopter. Her idea is to launch and assemble it in space rather than launch it into space in one rocket. The A.I of drone quadcopters fit the bill, they can swarm and have formation here on Earth, so why not in space? Her talk taught me so much of how our technology can be easily implemented into more technology for our future.
