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Part II:

This is a continuation. Part I described what a Rocket Scientist was like as a child and ended with a description how excited I was to go to Space Camp…

Years later my desire to work for NASA continued and I pursued and was offered a high school internship position at the Johnson Space Center during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. The high school internship was a lot like a scavenger hunt where we had to complete simple engineering projects, as well as set up our own tours and interviews with NASA employees. I met a few astronauts, as well as Embry-Riddle Prescott Alumni and Flight Director Norman Knight, and saw things that very few other people ever get a chance to see, like Mission Control, NASA robotics and moon rock laboratories.

This was my vantage point of Space Shuttle Mission Control when I sat behind the Flight Director desk. From this spot I was able to observe a training session for the mission that summer.

This is a picture of me in Space Shuttle Mission Control with the flight director desk behind me. This was taken during my high school internship

I had the opportunity to meet and take this picture of Space Shuttle Flight Director, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Prescott Graduate, Norman Knight during my high school internship. In the first picture I am standing next to his desk in Mission Control.

This is a picture of me and other high school interns next inside the NBL at JSC.

A second picture of the NBL from my internship.

A third picture of the NBL from my internship

This is a picture of me in the Quest Lab on the 3rd floor of the building that houses Mission Control, where I spent most of my time during my high school internship.

It was during my junior year of high school that I found Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and made it my first choice. I had to see the school that had a better Aerospace Engineering program than MIT and Caltech. I visited both Embry-Riddle campuses before I eventually decided on the Prescott campus.

To me, walking onto the Prescott campus felt like walking into my new home. I found that the people around campus and the people in town were exceptionally friendly. It didn’t take me more than a few seconds to fall in love with the landscape surrounding the campus either. In every direction I looked I could see mountains, and directly across the street from campus the Granite Dells stood majestically enticing me to hike and climb through them. The variety of the landscape was nothing like where I lived in Texas. In a thirty minute drive I was able to see a pine forest, high desert, awe-inspiring rock formations, mountains, and a lake. It was so breathtakingly beautiful.

This is a picture that I took from my dorm in 2008. You can see Hall 5 and the Dining hall on the right and the other dorms just below the horizon.

I was also excited to see all of the new facilities at the Prescott campus. In just the past few years the campus received the new King Engineering building, Academic Complex I, and the Aircraft Experimental Fabrication building. In addition, the new library and cafeteria were under construction when I visited. I walked through laboratories that nearly made my eyes pop out of my head. I saw incredible senior design projects that inspired admiration and respect. I spoke to professors that were so excited about the classes they taught and the success of their students that they were almost bubbly.

Later when Embry-Riddle came to a recruiting event in my hometown, my Admissions counselor not only remembered my name from my brief visit to campus, she remembered details that I had told her of my trip and other things we had spoken about. It was a great feeling to know that I was a person, rather than the number I was to the other universities that I had applied to.

Going to Embry-Riddle also played a key role in helping me to receive a paid position as a co-op at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. I received a call from the center offering me the position after I had given them a resume at the Embry-Riddle Industry and Career Expo months earlier. An interesting thing to note is that the other applicants were each interviewed over the phone before they were selected, while I was selected simply based off of my resume. Now I am a NASA employee on leave without pay until I return for my next co-op rotation and eventually to start my career after graduation.

These are the Spring 2009 DFRC Co-ops. I'm sitting on the sign on the right end. The girl four people to my right, Brittany Wells, is also an ERAU Prescott student. She will graduate and return to the center to start career this May.

This is another cool picture of me being goofy in the cockpit of the NASA 747 that carries the Space Shuttle back to the Kennedy Space Center after it lands in Edwards, CA.

Although I’m now 21, my 6-year-old self is still very close to my heart. I think that if I was able to meet her today (in a situation akin to what happened in the Disney film The Kid) she would be very excited and proud of what we have achieved. In addition to inspiring Mattel to create a Rocket Scientist Barbie and working on a project that one day becomes a NOVA documentary, one of my life’s goals is to always remain true to my six-year-old self; true to the six-year-old that decided she wanted to be a rocket scientist.

I'm finishing this two part blog, the way I started it, by remembering the aspirations that started on this trip to Space Center Houston when I was six years old.

Part I: The Beginning

“To thine own self be true.” – William Shakespeare

When people ask me how old I was when I figured out what I wanted to be, they usually aren’t prepared for my answer. I was six years old.

It all started when my family, residents of a suburb north of Houston, took a trip to the Johnson Space Center. My mom was into letting my sister and me dress ourselves even at the ages of 5 and 6. If I recall correctly, I was wearing a blue dress with white lacy socks and patent leather black shoes, while my sister was wearing a baby pink poodle skirt outfit that my cousin had sent her and white Keds.

This is a picture of me at Space Center Houston when I was six years old. It was taken on the historic day when I discovered my calling in life.

It was on that historic visit that I found what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life. As we left through the turnstiles that kept track of the number of visitors to the center, I proudly proclaimed to my parents, and anyone else who was exiting at closing time, “I am going to work for NASA one day.”

My parents thought it was an adorable childhood phase that I would one day grow out of. I never did. Well, there were a couple of times that I thought I might want to be something else. When Men in Black came out, the first PG-13 movie I saw in the theaters (a big deal to nine-year-old me), I wanted to be a Woman in Black. There was another period of about a month in the second grade when I was convinced that I’d be a paleontologist, and about 6 months in 8^th grade when I was exploring the idea of being an architect. Despite all of this, I continued to feel as though I was supposed to work for NASA.

When I was in the 4^th grade, I was the commander of our playground’s hemispherical jungle gym which was my spaceship and a couple of my friends and I would go on planetary exploration missions out of our ship to evaluate the alien life around us. I also turned my room into a spaceship in fourth grade. I got a large sheet of black plastic that I placed over my window and poked holes in it so that the constellations would shine into my room during the day when my lights were out. Then I replaced the lights in my ceiling fan with 25 watt blue lights.

I think the whole thing kind of weirded my mom out a bit, but she decided it was harmless and allowed me to continue entertaining myself with my own intergalactic missions that I conducted in my room. I was always really good at entertaining myself, and pride myself on continuing to have a strong, healthy imagination.

I was always a really nerdy kid. Starting in first grade at my elementary school, each class had a day and time once a week to visit the school library and check out books. It didn’t take me very long to find the science section. Each week I would bring home books about animals, dinosaurs, planets, etc. My mom grew very concerned. She called a conference with my first grade teacher about it.

“Kerianne keeps bringing home these books that are way over her reading level, and I’m afraid that she doesn’t know where the books that she can read are,” she told my first grade teacher.

At the next library session my teacher made me check out a Clifford book, and wouldn’t let me get the book on arctic seals that I wanted. I was so mad. When I got home, I jumped off the bus, stormed into my house, sat next to my mother, opened the book, and read the entire thing in a very deliberately agitated manner before closing the book and looking up at my mother in six-year-old rage.

“I have all the picture books that I need in my room, and I want to read science books. Why won’t you let me read science books?” I demanded of my mother.

“You can’t read all of the words in the science books,” my mother said in a cautiously apologetic tone.

“Maybe I can’t read all of the words, but I can read most of them, and I can figure out the rest, plus I can learn a lot from the pictures,” I said.

My mom and my teacher never made me check out another Clifford, Bernstein Bears, or other popular children’s books ever again.

In second grade they had this really cool interactive CD kit about the solar system at the book fair, and I begged my mother for it.

“There’s only one left!” I urged her.

I was exceptionally disappointed when it was gone the next day. My hopes and dreams were dashed and my need for knowledge of the solar system would never be satisfied. My mom told me years later that seeing my disappointment just about broke her heart, and she thought about giving me the CD then, but was glad when she could see my reaction on Christmas morning. That was a really cool CD. I found it when I was cleaning out a bunch of boxes over winter break and although it had never seen an operating system newer than Windows 95, I couldn’t bring myself to toss it.

All through elementary school I really wanted to go to Space Camp. When I was 11 I put together a MS PowerPoint presentation on the reasons why I thought my parents should send me to Space Camp. I felt I was pretty justified in my requests and somewhere between the adorableness of their 11-year-old with her PowerPoint and the desperate desire I expressed, my parents agreed to send me to Space Camp. I was so excited that I was counting down the days every day for 2 months.

Then after Space Camp, I practically lived in my flight suit for the rest of the summer. I still have it in my closet at home.

This is a picture of me, my sister and my cousin the summer after I went to space camp. I am the one in the flight suit from space camp and awesome sunglasses :). My sister is the one in the cheer leading outfit, and the normal looking one in the middle is my cousin. She's now a professional dancer on the New Jersey Nets dance team. I have never really been normal, but I'm as normal as my mother could get me to be. If it wasn't for her, I'd have no social skills or fashion sense (I might even still wear those horrible sun glasses), and my only hobby would be homework. :)

Stay tuned for Part II where I will tell you about how I found Embry-Riddle and started working for NASA…