I started my journey with Missouri S&T younger than some. I was 15, and I had recently gotten interested in stars, space, and satellites. My mother found the 2019 “Space: The Final Frontier” summer camp and suggested I enroll to experience a high-altitude balloon launch. After a look at the camp description, I signed up and was on my way to campus that July.
At S&T, I had a great time learning how to construct a cubesat payload—a small, insulated box containing cameras and/or sensors that is then attached to the string of a high-altitude weather balloon. I worked in a team of four students, and we spent the week of camp participating in STEM challenges and exploring Rolla. By the time I went to camp, S&T had already been involved in high altitude ballooning for almost 6 years, so the faculty and student workers had all kinds of information to share with the campers about their experiences. I left the camp with a wealth of knowledge, a professor’s business card, and plans to return to campus for college in three years.
My first semester on campus for school, I visited the offices of the professors who had been at the camp I attended years earlier. Because of this reunion, I heard about the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NEBP) that S&T had applied to participate with the following year. When the school was accepted as one of the 52 teams in the nationwide research program, I was included in the assembled student team.
NEBP work began in the spring semester of 2023 with a class teaching the students about atmospheric changes during a solar eclipse and how to handle all the equipment a balloon flight at 100,000 feet would need. Since I had done work like this before, I was also able to explore project planning and university outreach during this time. The following summer, we were sent the components and instructions to build our official NEBP engineering track sensors and livestreaming camera. The team spent the next few months constructing the payloads and troubleshooting issues alongside other teams of students from across the country.
With this guidance and determination, the S&T team was able to prepare all the payloads and perform a summer test launch before a successful flight in New Mexico during the October 2023 partial solar eclipse. After returning to Missouri, the team continued to refine and share their work before a second successful launch during the 2024 total solar eclipse.
My time with the NEBP team allowed me to revisit old interests and create resources for others. It gave me opportunities to share the NEBP team’s work with children, teachers, and scientists at expos and with the next generation of students at summer camps. I got the chance to share a love of science, research, and exploration with so many more people the same way it had been shared with me.
Though I didn’t choose to join another aerospace group at S&T following NEBP, the experience helped me find a niche that I didn’t know would fit me so well: project management. I was able connect with the Engineering Management honor society, Epsilon Mu Eta, to build on the planning and leadership skills from my undergraduate research experience. In the most unexpected way, a 2019 summer camp led me to a passion and opportunity I hadn’t known existed at the time. It took all the small successes along the way for me to get there—a staircase of steppingstones.
One of the challenges of college is feeling pressure to know exactly what life looks like after earning a degree. It can feel like there’s not enough space to find your interests or change your mind. It’s easy to worry about choosing the wrong degree or activities. What comforts me is being able to look back at how much I’ve learned through experience over the last five years. As the saying goes: an ounce of practice is worth more than ton of theory.
Now, at age 20 and less than a year away from graduation, I’ve been reflecting on my short time at S&T. Each small step or chance taken has helped teach me more about my field and myself. Over the next five years, on a larger scale, I’ll continue building on the same ideas in new ways. Where you are now is a starting point for where you’ll be—choose a direction and take a step. Even though the steps can feel small at each stone, over time, the impact is monumental.
So take the chances, be eager to learn, and don’t convince yourself the staircase has ended just because you’ve graduated. Keep learning and allowing opportunities to take you to new places—one steppingstone at a time.