Cory Simon...
Who is this Cory Simon?
Hey All! My name is Cory Simon and I’m a third year student in Computer
Engineering at Iowa State University. Before coming to ISU I had lived in the
same neighborhood of a small Iowa town called Winterset for my entire life.
If you’ve ever heard of “The Bridges of Madison County,” that’s
my town—Winterset is the county seat of Madison County.
I didn’t grow up with any great desire to work for NASA and actually
hadn’t even considered it a possibility until about a week before the
ISU engineering career fair. I looked through the list of companies attending
and saw that at NASA I could work with robotics and microcontroller programming.
That was exactly what I wanted to do so I added them to my list of companies
to meet with and made NASA my last stop at the career fair. I talked to Bob
Musgrove, interviewed with him the next day, and got a call in October telling
me there was a coop position waiting for me in January. I felt a little bad
leaving the clubs I was involved in, but everyone understood. I mean, come
on, it’s NASA.
“Work”
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Ellington Field and
the T-38's |
I still question whether you can call what I do work; it’s too cool to be called work. A huge number of people who are here fulltime started as coops and it seems like they’re always willing to help out someone new, whether that’s finding a building, knowing how to fill out paperwork, or a difficult technical question. I’m encouraged to go to the tours and lectures to learn about NASA, and my division has let me take classes on leadership and management with project managers. It’s an amazing atmosphere. I work in EV6—the Government Furnished Equipment Product Engineering Branch of the Avionics Systems Division of the Engineering Directorate. I’m not working with robotics like I had hoped, but I’m very happy with what I’m doing instead. In a nutshell my project is to help certify a replacement piece of hardware for the shuttle that converts analog video to digital, records it, and sends it to Earth. That may be a little oversimplified, but it’s the general idea.
I’ve really enjoyed getting to know the system and being part of a team of engineers testing it. I wrote up a test plan that was used on the C-9 reduced gravity flight, and flew to Indiana to perform radiation testing at the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility. I’ll admit, it doesn’t sound all that exciting, but I’m loving it. The people are great and I’ve learned a ton about video, electronics, real-world engineering, the space program, the space shuttle, the space communications network, radiation, and NASA in general.
Definitely Not Work
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Erin's Brithday Party |
So you take about thirty young adults who are, in general, intelligent, outgoing,
capable, and active. You put them all together within driving distance of the
beach in one direction and the fourth largest city in the country in the other
and give them nights and weekends free. Plus you pay them for what they do
during the day. It’s nice to be one of those young adults.
Each of the coops is easily capable of planning some activity, and most do.
I volunteered to captain/coach the soccer team, so I got a field reserved for
practice, collected money, handed out shirts, made sure everyone knew the rules,
and other little stuff. Other people have organized a softball team, broomball,
curling, volleyball, and ultimate Frisbee. Others have arranged skydiving,
scuba diving, camping, rock climbing, ballroom dancing, salsa dancing, and
hiking. Others have planned dinners, club and bar visits, LAN parties, museum
tours, movie nights, and going to the beach. We keep pretty busy. Plus there
are plenty of spontaneous activities that fill every other night of the week.
The life of a NASA coop is good to say the least.
Revelation
After the first month of work here, I realized that I have a once in a lifetime
experience about once a week. The places I go, the people I see, and the culture
I’ve become a part of are things that very few people ever experience.
I can’t imagine anywhere I would rather be or anything I’d rather
be doing. I’m still amazed that I’ve been given the opportunity
to be here. I mean, come on, it’s NASA!
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