Graduating college is hard enough. Finding a job is even harder. But a strong resume, an impressive interview and maybe just a little bit of luck can put an applicant on a plane to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
That’s what happened to Angela-Marie Conklin, a Bow High School almuna and recent graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. In July, she’ll move south to Cape Canaveral and join NASA’s team working on the Orion spacecraft.
Orion – named after the prominent constellation seen in the night sky – is designed to carry a crew deeper into space, far beyond what has already been reached with humans aboard. NASA describes Orion as “the safest, most advanced spacecraft ever built, and it will be flexible and capable enough to take us to a variety of destinations.”
The main destination is Mars, where last year NASA confirmed evidence that shows water is flowing freely on the planet today.
“The idea is to get people there to check it out and eventually, hopefully, colonize it,” Conklin said. “I don’t think we’ll see (colonization) necessarily in my lifetime, but we’ll be getting people there.”
Orion completed a first flight in 2014, orbiting the Earth twice and reaching a high point of about 3,600 miles from the planet. The trial flight lasted about four hours and tested the safety of its launch and return systems. The spacecraft has an anticipated launch date in late 2018.
Conklin will be part of a five-member team tasked with designing the spacecraft’s control systems. If that sounds complicated, it is. Conklin admits she’s a bit nervous, but her first job upon arrival is to pay attention and soak up all the information thrown at her.
That, she says, should be manageable. “I’m supposed to just be like a sponge at first,” Conklin said.
So how did she land this gig anyway?
Like most college seniors, Conklin was balancing her academic responsibilities with job searches throughout the fall. But as it goes, for every batch of applications that went out, only some companies would respond and likely after several weeks, or months, of waiting.
The NASA job didn’t come up through any connections or networking by Conklin. It was an ad, like those that pop up on the side of a webpage. She clicked and filed an application. Weeks passed, and in November she got a call to schedule an interview.
After a two-hour interview over Skype, the job was offered to Conklin, who didn’t have a hard time saying yes. With the job in hand, Conklin went down to the Kennedy Space Center to check out facility and meet her team.
“It was absolutely unreal,” she said.
There were plenty of those “pinch me” moments while Conklin toured her new place of work. It’s the result of hard work, but she says finding a job at NASA was never a goal because she never thought it was within her reach.
“Getting this job was more than just getting a job for me,” Conklin said. “Not that it should be about anybody else, but it was showing people that I really did know what I was doing.”
It was about proving that to herself, too. As a high school student in Bow, Conklin kept her head down and focused on studying to get into a good college, and she did. WPI is ranked by U.S. News & World Report in the top 100 schools for engineering in the nation. But when she arrvied on the Worcester campus as a freshman, she was already burnt out.
“Freshman year was tough,” said Conklin, who majored in electrical and computer engineering. “I was homesick, I thought everyone there was smarter than me.”
But she turned it around during her sophomore year when she became a residential assistant and found a group of close friends that she stuck with through graduation.
“I found my school family, and that’s how I got through,” Conklin said.
Now, she has her sights set on the future with a new job and a new home in Florida. She already has an apartment picked out, but won’t move in until July. At the end of May, Conklin will fly to Ghana to do a month of work with a team building solar panels to power a remote village.
She laughs, shakes her head.
“It’s going to be a busy summer,” she said. “I’m excited to start a new life.”
(Nick Stoico can be reached at 369-3309, nstoico@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @NickStoico.)