Isabel Agundis. Courtesy photo.
SANTA BARBARA — While most her fellow Santa Barbara City College students are attending their spring semester classes here in Santa Barbara, Isabel Agundis, a Mechanical Engineering major, is enjoying an educational experience of a different kind: an internship at NASA.
The internship provides Ms. Agundis with hands-on, mentored experiences and professional activities that contribute directly to the execution of NASA’s ongoing missions. As one of eighty student interns from around the country at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, she is the only community college student selected for the program this term.
“I never thought that getting an internship would allow me to be this close to all the technology and research that is being developed, and allow me to interact with those who have accomplished so many great things,” said Ms. Agundis in a recent interview. “I see it like being at Disneyland for those who are passionate about STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).
One project she is working on involves testing material composites of the Orion spacecraft and writing a technical, peer-reviewed manuscript on the results of her research for publication in a future issue of Metallography, Microstructure and Analysis, the official journal of the International Metallographic Society.
Also charged with preparing and implementing the 2018 sessions for NASA’s Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS), she is exploring NASA topics to create new final project options for students, while also brainstorming new strategies to recruit more underserved students to NCAS. Ms. Agundis was an NCAS scholar herself in 2017.
As a student in the STEM program at SBCC, Ms. Agundis credits the guidance and support she received from her professors and math tutor. “I wouldn’t be here without them,” she said.
When asked what the most exciting thing is about being at the Johnson Space Center, she replied, “Being able to interact with real astronauts and see what they do. NASA has proved to me that everything is possible.”