Joe Fronczek...
Personal Info
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Inside the Japanese Experimental Module |
Hello and welcome to my Co-Op page. My name is Joe Fronczek and I was born and raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I am now 24 years old and currently a Senior majoring in Chemical Engineering with minors in Chemistry and Math at New Mexico State University. GO AGGIES! NMSU may be a fairly small school, but its Engineering program is top notch and I have come across a lot of great opportunities while going there. including this one! I will also be flying aboard the Vomit Comet this summer, NASA's microgravity aircraft! I was also selected for the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts Student Fellows Prize. When I'm not stuck doing homework, I enjoy hiking in the Organ Mountains near Las Cruces, playing chess or guitar, and just hanging out with my buds. But you could care less about all of this stuff, so.
The Path to Co-Op Land
If you have been reading through some of the other co-op bios, you might have realized that becoming a NASA co-op isn't nearly as impossible as most people would think. My story is very similar to others and goes something like this.
I got another e-mail at school announcing yet another Career Fair was coming. I browsed through the list of attending companies expecting the same list of boring sounding companies that I'm not interested in working for. Being a small school, NMSU had not built up a relationship with the NASA co-op program and they had never really recruited there before. This time however, I noticed that NASA would be there and that students could sign up for a "30-minute consultation session" where we could ask questions to a NASA recruiter. I signed up for one of the slots, not really knowing what to expect. I showed up the next day in my normal school clothes and luckily brought a resume. because the Q&A session ended up being a formal interview! Basically I just tried to let my interest and enthusiasm about our space program shine through. Afterward, my interviewer said that I did very well and that I should expect a call sometime about a month later! A couple of weeks later, I started sending the nagging e-mails to the Co-Op office to show that I wasn't just going to sit around and wait for them to contact me. I was crushed when I got a call later from Bob Musgrove saying, "Sorry, all of the co-op positions had been filled." Instead of whining like a baby and getting all upset, I let him know that I was still really interested if any openings became available. I then proceeded to settle down for the summer and signed a 1-year apartment lease with my girlfriend.
Two days later, Bob Musgrove called me back and said an opening had become available if I was still interested. It took me about 10 minutes to decide whether I was willing to leave it all behind and go to JSC. "I'm in!" All of my persistence and nagging (politely) finally paid off! This diatribe was a little long-winded but if you are interested in becoming a co-op, I figured this was the meat you were looking for.
Work at JSC
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The SSMTF is awesome! |
It is currently Summer `06 and I am on my third co-op tour. My first and current tours have been in the International Space Station Training Division under the Mission Operations Directorate. This group is responsible for teaching our astronauts everything they need to know to survive while up in space. I work in the Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS) group where we focus on the hardware that supplies oxygen to the crew, scrubs CO2 from the atmosphere, recycles and supplies water, and a whole lot of other things including responding to emergencies such as fires and rapid depressurization. Working here, I get to spend a lot of time at the Space Station Mockup Test Facility (SSMTF) which is a FULL-SCALE mockup of the ISS! (See picture) I get to help run simulations for real astronauts and watch them running around dealing with emergency scenarios. It still blows my mind some of the people I have got to meet while working here!
During the Summer of 2005, I worked my second tour back in Las Cruces at the White Sands Testing Facility. I recommend completing a tour here to anyone who loves hands on work. Being a testing facility, there is a lot of hands-on laboratory work going on. I was lucky enough to work on an External Tank Ice Mitigation project which helped the Space Shuttle Return to Flight in July, 2005! I helped to develop an epoxy coating to stop ice from forming at cryogenic temperatures during liquid oxygen fueling at KSC prior to launch. The ice that formed on the External Tank posed a debris hazard during takeoff. I also got to see a lot of other cool stuff at WSTF like rocket testing and hypervelocity impact testing. The only downside to working at WSTF was the lack of a Co-Op community compared to JSC. There was only one other co-op on site when I was there. I personally liked working at JSC more than WSTF (maybe just to get out of my hometown finally!), but both were fascinating and wonderful experiences!
Being a NASA Co-Op
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The sprawling metropolis that is JSC |
Is the coolest thing I have ever been a part of!!! It ended up being even better than I had imagined! At first I was a little apprehensive about leaving behind my girlfriend and all of my buds to take off on my own to Houston. What I didn't know at the time is that there are generally 50-80 other undergraduate co-ops at JSC at any given time. and we all know how to have a good time! There is ALWAYS something to do here. Some past co-op activities have included skydiving, scuba diving, organizing sports teams (soccer, softball, football, you name it!), parties, movies and anything else. My favorite part about being a co-op is getting away from school (which I was worried about at first, HA!) because once you get out of work, you don't have to go home and do tons of homework and study for exams. Your weekends are actually YOURS to enjoy! Besides all of the great stuff on the side, working at JSC is exciting all by itself!
If you have ANY other questions about how to become a NASA Co-Op or what it is like to be one, feel free to email me: jfroncze@nmsu.edu ! Go for it!!!
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