Though a bittersweet truth, summer has come to an end. While some of us spent our days lazing in the sun at the beach, sprawling across our couches watching TV with the ‘rents and gorging ourselves on home-cooked meals, many students were working out in the mythical “real world.”
For the past two summers, second-year Engineering student Grace Wusk has interned at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. as part of the Langley Aerospace Research Student Scholars (LARSS) program. Wusk worked with a member of the Crew Systems and Aviation Operations branch in a flight simulator lab for 10 weeks.
“[The Crew Systems and Aviation Operations branch] wants to get a better understanding of the pilot state when flying planes,” Wusk said. In order to do so, Wusk’s lab runs a flight simulator and takes different physiological measures such as heart rate, skin temperature and a measure called galvanic skin response to see if the pilot’s workload is changing.
Though Wusk worked on the same project for two summers, she said she was granted a lot more independence this time round.
“I pretty much got to run the simulator by myself,” she said. “They taught me to boot up all the computers and run the simulators,” which she said is not just a computer screen — it imitates a cockpit with flight controls, a joystick, and projectors to mimic real window displays so it looks and feels as if you are flying in the air.
Not only did the internship allow Wusk to apply the knowledge she’s gained in the University’s Engineering school, it also allowed her to use things she had learned from her Introduction to Computer Science course at the University and from high school psychology classes.
That interdisciplinary approach is only strengthened by the number of other students participating in the internship programs at NASA, Wusk said.
“It was really cool to work with people with a wide variety of interests and backgrounds who are all interested in the same thing,” she said. “You get them talking about Mars, landing on the moon or aeronautics, and they all get really excited.”
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