CSUMB intern aims at a future with NASA and, maybe, Otter space

By Mark Muckenfuss

Mission planners at NASA have a better idea of the risk of failure these days, thanks to CSUMB’s Monica Aguilar. 

Aguilar, who graduated in May with a degree in computer science, has done three stints with NASA as an intern, the most recent being this fall. She is hoping to land a full-time job with the agency.

“They’re some of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” she said. “They do so many cool things everywhere.”

She first participated in an online NASA scholarship program as a student at Santa Barbara City College. The beachfront community is her hometown. While there, she worked remotely for a program called Lucy Student Pipeline Accelerator and Competency Enabler, or L’SPACE. The 12-week, two-pronged program offers the Mission Concept Academy and the NASA Proposal Writing and Evaluation Experience Academy. Aguilar participated in the former while, at the same time, completing another NASA internship.  

In the process, she said, “We learned how NASA designs missions.” 

At the suggestion of the group’s mentor, Aguilar was elected as the project manager for her team.  

Along with the group’s deputy project manager, she said, “We helped make sure everybody stayed on track.”

Aguilar said it’s easy for people to get sucked into a rabbit hole while researching an aspect of a mission. As other team members explored different facets of mission design, she tackled her own subject.

“I focused on the business administration type of things,” she said. “We were using natural-language processing algorithms to make a question/answer bot for analyzing project documents. We had to look at things like, ‘What’s outreach going to look like?’ ‘What’s the budget going to look like?’”

Over the course of 12 weeks, the team produced a 150-page document meant to serve as a guide to more effective mission planning

This past summer, she worked a management and business analytics internship at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where she began analyzing risk quantitatively. 

Molly Kearns is a mentor for the intern programs at Glenn Research Center, where she is the digital media specialist for the Space Communications and Navigation program. She said Aguilar’s work over the summer impressed her and others at the center. Of the 32 interns involved in this summer’s program, Aguilar was one of only two asked to come back for a four-month, full-time internship this fall. 

“She’s been a great addition to our team,” Kearns said. “She hit the ground running.”

Aguilar’s focus this fall has been on continuing her summer work, writing a risk-assessment program for project managers. The graphic user interface is specifically designed for project teams to analyze risk, budget and schedule data simultaneously. The program saves time as it now allows project teams to quantitatively review the data on a single platform, something they couldn’t do before. 

“We wanted to look at risk more as a statistic,” Aguilar said, “as a percentage of likelihood: How likely is the scenario to happen? The main goal was [to] use this tool to identify how much margin we need when designing a project.”

She is hoping to land a job with the space agency where she can use her knowledge of both computer science and geology. 

Kearns said people may not realize the many avenues NASA’s work reaches into.

“There is definitely a place for you and your interests at NASA,” Kearns said. “Anything you can think of, we need.”

She encourages students to apply for internships with the agency. When she was a college student seeking internship opportunities, she applied to NASA, not expecting she would be chosen, she said.

“I thought there was a zero-percent chance I would get an internship with NASA,” she said. “In the end, I heard back from nobody but NASA.”

Assisting with the internship program in Cleveland “has been a great full-circle experience,” she said.

Aguilar said she feels CSUMB set her up for success. One of the main things that attracted her to the university was the social opportunities and the promise of connecting with her fellow students. 

“I felt the amount of collaboration I did in my classes really gave me what I needed for these internships,” she said. “I think CSUMB prepared me really well.”