The snow was stinging the exposed portions of my face as it blew sideways at me when I left my final class of the day today. Just a few more yards, just a few to go. I could see my car now. It was going to be my refuge, my escape from the winter storm between me and a cup of hot tea in front of the fireplace of my cozy apartment

Snow outside the King Engineering building this morning

In a few minutes I’ll be out of this wind and comfortable and cozy and content, I thought to myself. I pressed the button on my keychain to unlock my car doors and nothing happened. Huh, the battery in my keychain must be out. Wouldn’t be the first time, this is my spare key chain.

Unphased, I opened my car with my key, threw all of my stuff into the back seat, and jumped into my car before slamming the door. The wind and snow free car was a welcome relief. I shivered as I brushed the snow off of my jacket and stuck my key into the ignition. I turned the key.

Nothing.

I started to feel a surge of panic. I turned the key again.

Nothing.

S–t! Now what? I thought in mild despair.

I saw a young man approaching the car next to mine and I jumped out of my car.

“Do you know how to jump start a battery?” I asked franticly.

“Yeah, sure!” he said. “I don’t have any cables, though. Do you?”

“I don’t know, let me look in my trunk. Wait! I can’t open my trunk, my battery is dead!”

“Use your key,” he said in a friendly tone.

“Oh…yeah.”

I opened my trunk, pulled up the carpet and plywood covering my spare, and searched every square inch. No cables.

“I don’t have cables either, sorry. Thanks for trying to help me though!” I said in the cheeriest tone I could muster in my circumstances.

I climbed back in my car again to escape the brutal weather, and pulled out my phone to text my boyfriend.

My battery on my car is definitely dead. I’m calling AAA.

I remembered my dad had signed me up for AAA this Christmas, just before I texted the last line. Pulling out my AAA card, I quickly located the phone number on the back and dialed. It connected and I quickly gave the friendly lady on the other end all of my information.

“And you’re location?”

“Prescott, Arizona,” I responded.

“Oh, well you called the number for Southern California, let me redirect you.”

I gave the Arizona lady all of my information again and she promised me help within an hour.

I didn’t want to go out in the storm again and I only had a five minute warning phone call to get back to my car, so I just stayed in my car and pulled out my Aircraft Structures II homework. Maybe the storm will get better before the guy gets here. No such luck, the storm continued to worsten.

45 minutes later when I got my call and directed the AAA dispatch to my car on campus, the storm looked as close to a blizzard as I’d ever seen (of course I’ve only ever lived in Arizona, Texas, and Southern California, so that really isn’t saying much in the grand scheme of things).

“Whoa, how old is this battery?” he asked as he began his initial inspection.

“I don’t know.”

“It looks old,” he said. “It’s all corroded, let me test it and we’ll see if it’s completely dead or if it just needs a charge.”

He hooked up this meter thingy to the metal thingys on top and took some kind of reading.

“Well, it looks like you need a new battery.”

“Can you start it up so I can get somewhere, or is it completely dead?” I asked.

“I can start it up, but you can’t turn the car off again, or it might not turn back on.”

“Do you sell batteries?”

“Yes but I already sold yours today, plus my batteries will be a lot more expensive than what you could get at the store.”

We got my car running, I signed some paperwork, and then I climbed back in my car. As I was waiting for my back window to defrost, my boyfriend texted me back.

I’m so sorry, do you need me to pick you up?

I called him and updated him. We decided that I was going to pick him up and we were going to go to AutoZone to get a new battery. The snow was lashing around my windshield as I drove through the fog that was actually snow on my mission to get a new battery. Then finally we made it to AutoZone.

I gave the man the make, model, and year of my car. They had my battery and it was in stock. YAY!!!!!

I also was very fortunate that my boyfriend knew what to do as he borrowed an unscrewer tool thingy from AutoZone that made this clicking noise when he pulled it backward and proceeded to take my old battery out for the $5 battery fee thingy, and put the new battery in. $95 later, all was fixed.

I couldn’t help but laugh a little the entire time. Murphy’s Law was in action. Not only did my battery die, but it died during the middle of a winter storm. Not too much harm was done though. All of my classes were over for the day, so I wasn’t going to miss anything, I learned about how to change car batteries and what to do when your battery was dead, and I got it all fixed in a couple hours. I emerged from my challenge ready to meet a new one, which I did – finishing my Aircraft Structures II homework…

The view from the side of Granite Mountain

While most couples would enjoy a nice dinner and possibly a movie on Valentine’s Day, my boyfriend and I decided to go for a hike. A few of my friends thought the idea was kind of weird, but when you think about it, engineering students like me and my boyfriend are hardly typical.

Last weekend provided the first real opportunity to go hiking. I’ve been kept from hiking every other weekend this semester by inclement weather or newspaper production (as a section editor on the paper, I basically devote every other weekend to designing layout for our bimonthly paper).

Although I did have production on that weekend, we finished just after noon on Sunday and by 2:00 Sunday afternoon my boyfriend and I were standing at the beginning of the Metate Trailhead that leads up Granite Mountain.

Base of the trail

Granite Mountain is a majestic granite formation that is visible from most of campus, and the site of several close, beautiful hiking trails.

We only had about four hours until the parking lot would be closed at 6:00pm, so we set out to travel as far as we could up the mountain before turning back in two hours.

The weather was perfect. The sky was nearly cloudless, the breeze light, and the temperature a mild 50 degrees. We couldn’t have asked for anything better.

Granite mountain can be seen through the trees

The melting snow from this winter's storms created beautiful trickling streams around the mountain

The landscape was absolutely beautiful. Tall evergreens and smaller, bald deciduous trees lined both sides of the path. We marched along at a moderate pace, discussing our exciting hopes and plans for the future and exchanging childhood anecdotes.

View during the hike

We weren’t the only ones who had decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather on Valentine’s Day. Many other couples greeted us, smiling as we passed them.

One of the great things about hiking is that it is nearly impossible to be in a foul mood when you’re far from the stresses of real world life and surrounded by the beauty of nature and good company. Not one of the people that we passed was anything but pleasant, and it just added to the positivity of the trip.

When you are as busy and stressed as an engineering student in their junior or senior year of study, getting away from it all for a few hours on a beautiful hiking trail is nothing but a blessing. The Prescott campus is surrounded by beautiful hiking and climbing spots.

We didn’t quite make it all the way up the mountain, but we plan to return the next chance we have when the weather is beautiful and our weekend isn’t eaten up by production. As we got back into the car we turned to look back at the mountain through the trees and declared, “We’ll be back mountain! You may have conquered us today, but we’ll be back, and next time we’ll make it all the way to the top!”

The view of Granite Mountain as we reached our car

Don’t worry, we are not that crazy…it’s just like I said in the beginning, we’re engineers and therefore, a little quirky.

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.