For my internship, I worked at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. My main project centered around helping out with an Astro-Animation Exhibition, but throughout my ten weeks I also got to work as a graphics support artist. I had multiple mentors for the exhibition and for my graphics support work. This summer, I worked on researching and prototyping potential animation related activities for the exhibition as well as many other graphics projects, including photography assistance, photo processing, logo design, and creating an illustrated poster.
I found out about this internship in my Astro-Animation class last semester taught by my mentors. They were already familiar with my work from other classes I had taken with them and so I applied for the position, went through a short interview process and got hired from there. One of the exhibition mentors is an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard and so I was given a desk in-person in the office of my graphics support mentors. Despite technically working for my supervisor for the exhibition, others were more than happy to act as additional mentors for me and teach me about the graphics support work they do and they provided me with a lot of opportunities to work on graphics projects on top of my work with my mentors.
One of my favorite things about this internship was the amount of outreach I was able to do and the connections I was able to make all over Goddard. With the help of my mentors, I was able to sit in on a lot of cool meetings with different scientists and groups. One such connection that really excited me was that I was able to meet and interview members of the Conceptual Imaging Lab, the animation team of Goddard. Watching the work of professionals in a field I want to pursue was so exciting and inspiring, but it also made me more confident in how achievable that kind of career path is.
I’m really proud of how much I pushed myself to take every opportunity I could and put myself out there. I haven’t always been the most confident in my abilities as a professional artist, but networking this summer and meeting with really cool NASA scientists and artists helped me feel like I was really making the best out of my internship.
