When we last left our heroine, she was making her way from Grandma’s house to meet up with her friends in Vegas. We now return for part two!

Me and Josh in front of Vegas Sign

I didn’t know if I was going to like Vegas. It’s Sin City, and I kind of saw it as this trashy place where people lose all of their money: Lost Wages, if you will. Now part of that assessment is true, but for the most part I really enjoyed Vegas. I think what I liked the most was the freedom of it. Nobody cared what you did. It was sort of a general “F-it, it’s Vegas” anything goes attitude. The chill atmosphere was a complete departure from the uptight world I normally resided in, so I excitedly joined the party (although, I did so conservatively). It was basically a giant theme park for grownups.

Cigarette Vending Machine

I don’t know if there is a more epic place to spend St. Patrick’s Day than Las Vegas, NV. The entire city is one huge party, with Irish Music blasting from restaurants all down the strip, tons of bad drunken attempts at Irish accents, and lots and lots of green. My friends invited one of the German exchange students to come with us and forgot to tell him about St. Patrick’s Day.

“Dude where’s your green shirt?”

“What green shirt? I don’t have a green shirt.”

“It’s St. Patrick’s Day! Why don’t you bring anything green?”

“What is St. Patrick’s Day?” asked the German.

It never occurred to us that he wouldn’t know about St. Patrick’s day, but when you think about it, it’s an Irish American holiday, so why would he? After a swarm of drunken people engaged in a massive pinching attack, our German friend purchased a green necklace and Dr. Seuss style hat.

Our German friend Markus learns about the Irish American holiday of St. Patrick's Day

Markus, Me and Josh at the America Restaurant in the New York New York Casino

My St. Patrick’s Day shirt was a green shirt with shamrocks and white and pink lettering that read “Blondes have all the luck.” I figured it was perfect for Vegas. “We’ll have to see if it’s a sincere or sarcastic statement during this trip,” I told my friend as they read my shirt.

We stayed at the Tropicana where we got a really good deal because my boyfriend’s aunt works there. My share of the room was only $90 total for three nights during spring break when the rates are really high, which was an Awesome Deal!

This was our hotel on the strip

For meals, we usually looked for awesome deals. On the first night we got crab, steak, or crab and steak specials for $14.99 at the America Restaurant in the New York, New York Casino. Our German friend asked “Yes, could you please give me crabs?” and after a massive fit of giggles, we explained what he had said to him.

The second day we got all you can eat all day buffet tickets in the Excalibur Casino for $29.99, and the third day we got steak and lobster tail specials on Fremont street for $11.99. I consumed so much food during the trip that the after effects are probably worse than the holidays, but it was so worth it!!!

Buffets are such an awesome concept, aren’t they? You can get as much as you want of whatever you want. And I did!

Kerianne's buffet fun!!! See if you can spot all of these foods in the image above: Pizza, Rotisserie Chicken, Barbecue Beans, Macaroni and Cheese, Mashed Potatoes, Hush puppies, Lemon, Catfish, Cranberry Sauce, Crab Wonton, Black-eyed peas, Steak Fries...I think that's all of them...

What would a trip to Vegas be without gambling? At first I thought I wouldn’t gamble, because I’m a penny pinching college student, and I couldn’t stand the thought of losing money. Then I decided that it was worth the life experience and free drinks, and determined that $50 would be my limit for a loss. It was an entertainment expense.

I couldn’t bring myself to seriously gamble in the slot machines because every time I watched a person sitting in their chair pushing a button repeatedly on the machine in front of them, it reminded me of B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning experiments where he trained his pigeons to peck metal disks in their cages for little food pellets.

I decided that if I were to gamble, it would have to in something that involves a little strategy and thought processes, so I chose blackjack.

My boyfriend and I practiced a little blackjack before the trip so I knew all the rules and basic strategy. I sat down at the first table, a $5 minimum table, exchanged$ 40 for some chips, and started to play. At this point my shirt was proving to be pretty correct, when I walked away a hour and a half later with a $75 profit.

Later that afternoon all of the tables on the strip were pretty much at $10-100 minimums, so we went off the strip to the Silverton Casino and found another table. It was pretty awesome because we filled the table so we knew everyone and we could cheer for each other. I was up about $50 when most of my friends were down. So we kept playing. One of my friends was on their last chip twice before he made a huge comeback. We stopped when we were all in the black again. I finished $15 up bringing my running total to $90. We used our winnings to justify ordering room service for breakfast the next day.

Room Service Breakfast

Me eating room service breakfast

I spent hours during the week playing blackjack. At the end of the trip, I was $30 up and decided that gambling was a ton of fun if you weren’t stupid about it. For me, it meant hours upon hours of entertainment, a payoff in the end, and tons of free drinks at the tables. When drinks are going for about $10 each, free drinks are awesome!

The only drinks I actually bought in Vegas were two giant daiquiris from Fat Tuesday, which ran me about $20.

Source of awesome, huge, cheap, strawberry daiquiris

An appropriately blurry picture of our group and our daiquiris

When you are drinking a decent amount, you have to drink a ton of water to keep from getting dehydrated and to avoid the infamous hangover. Most places are required by law to give you a free cup of water if you ask for it, and when I didn’t have a bottle of water, I occasionally did ask for cups of water. The most memorable account of this was when we went to McDonalds on the strip and I asked for a McCup of water. The lady behind the counter was not at all impressed, but I didn’t take it personally because I realized that I probably wasn’t the only slightly inebriated person to make a smart comment that evening.

Look, water has it's own dispenser and not just one of those tab thingys under the lemonade.

How McDonald's on the strip looks to most of it's patrons....

The giant theme park aspect of Vegas is exceptionally evident in its themed casinos in varying levels of cheesiness. Don’t get me wrong, many of the casinos are very elegant inside, but they are not without their cheesy themes.

New York New York Casino

The last night that we were there we traveled down to Fremont Street, also sometimes called Old Vegas. Now this we expected to be exceptionally cheesy, but it was actually a ton of fun! Freemont Street didn’t share the same kind of stuck up feeling that some of the casinos on the strip had in the evenings. It was pretty happening on a Friday night, with live music in the streets, and most of the people down there were pretty real people. $5 tables were plentiful and so were dinner specials. We had a blast.

Fremont Street

One of the really exciting things for me about Fremont Street was that some of the casinos still had the old coin operated slot machines. I had to throw five dollars in one and play till it was gone, not because I had hopes of winning the jackpot, but because I considered it an investment in keeping the novelty of those machines around for years to come. I did at one point cash out just so I could hear and see all the nickels dropping out into the tray, but I ended up putting them all back in the machine.

Nickel collector on old slot machine

Me at real coin machine

All in all it was an awesome Spring Break! It was fun and relaxing and rejuvenating to a certain extent. It was more fun than I’d had in a long time. Now back to school…

One of the wonderful traditions of the American education system is the much appreciated and anticipated Spring Break. Once a year, students flock from all over the country to exciting destinations to escape the stress and routine of their classes.

My freshman year I went home for spring break, as many freshmen do in their first year away from home. Once you get older though, going home isn’t as exciting as it used to be. Now, everyone back home has difference spring breaks or has to work, which primarily results in me twittling my thumbs on the couch… My sophomore year I didn’t have a spring break because I was on a co-op in California, rather than at school for a semester.

This year I decided to make my Spring Break count. A group of my senior friends also decided to make this Spring Break count, since it would probably be their last.

My Spring Break could really be divided into two distinctive parts. The first part was more of a relaxing journey with some form of productivity in mind. The second part was meeting those senior friends in Vegas where I planned to be exceptionally unproductive.

This is the story of the first part of spring break. I started Spring Break officially on Friday when I stopped doing academic work and instead went shopping (I hadn’t seen the mall for more than a month), and enjoyed a relaxing date with my boyfriend.

My journey started on Saturday when I jumped in my car and headed for Southern California, but not the beach side of Southern California that you’d expect. My destination was the middle of the Mojave Desert with three separate purposes in mind: one, to visit my friends from my Co-op at NASA Dryden, two, to shop for an apartment for my next co-op term, and three, to go shopping.

While in California I stayed with one of my close friends and we went out for dinner, drinks, and live music Saturday night. I went clothes shopping Sunday and apartment shopping Monday, during which I successfully purchased a new outfit for a night out, and compiled enough information on the AV apartment market through numerous visits to make a PowerPoint presentation titled “Kerianne’s Apartment Information Reconnaissance Mission,” which I sent to my parents and prospective roommate.

I left Tuesday morning, making my trip just under the three day mark, a rule which my family tends to stick to when visiting and staying with other people. My maternal grandmother always used to say, “Fish and houseguests start to stink after three days.”

From California, I made my way to Vegas to visit my grandmother. We combed over old pictures while she reminisced and told me how wonderful I was (which is something that grandmothers are really good at, and one reason people will go back and visit them). I was there from noon Tuesday to four Wednesday, enough to be filled with lots of good food! I also set up a video chat with my parents, which was the first time my grandmother had ever done a video chat. “What will they think of next?” she remarked afterwards.

Me, Gmom and Jim at a buffet for dinner.

Tune in tomorrow for the next, and more exciting part of Kerianne’s Spring Break: VEGAS!!!

The snow was stinging the exposed portions of my face as it blew sideways at me when I left my final class of the day today. Just a few more yards, just a few to go.I could see my car now. It was going to be my refuge, my escape from the winter storm between me and a cup of hot tea in front of the fireplace of my cozy apartment

Snow outside the King Engineering building this morning

In a few minutes I’ll be out of this wind and comfortable and cozy and content, I thought to myself. I pressed the button on my keychain to unlock my car doors and nothing happened. Huh, the battery in my keychain must be out. Wouldn’t be the first time, this is my spare key chain.

Unphased, I opened my car with my key, threw all of my stuff into the back seat, and jumped into my car before slamming the door. The wind and snow free car was a welcome relief. I shivered as I brushed the snow off of my jacket and stuck my key into the ignition. I turned the key.

Nothing.

I started to feel a surge of panic. I turned the key again.

Nothing.

S–t! Now what? I thought in mild despair.

I saw a young man approaching the car next to mine and I jumped out of my car.

“Do you know how to jump start a battery?” I asked franticly.

“Yeah, sure!” he said. “I don’t have any cables, though. Do you?”

“I don’t know, let me look in my trunk. Wait! I can’t open my trunk, my battery is dead!”

“Use your key,” he said in a friendly tone.

“Oh…yeah.”

I opened my trunk, pulled up the carpet and plywood covering my spare, and searched every square inch. No cables.

“I don’t have cables either, sorry. Thanks for trying to help me though!” I said in the cheeriest tone I could muster in my circumstances.

I climbed back in my car again to escape the brutal weather, and pulled out my phone to text my boyfriend.

My battery on my car is definitely dead. I’m calling AAA.

I remembered my dad had signed me up for AAA this Christmas, just before I texted the last line. Pulling out my AAA card, I quickly located the phone number on the back and dialed. It connected and I quickly gave the friendly lady on the other end all of my information.

“And you’re location?”

“Prescott, Arizona,” I responded.

“Oh, well you called the number for Southern California, let me redirect you.”

I gave the Arizona lady all of my information again and she promised me help within an hour.

I didn’t want to go out in the storm again and I only had a five minute warning phone call to get back to my car, so I just stayed in my car and pulled out my Aircraft Structures II homework. Maybe the storm will get better before the guy gets here. No such luck, the storm continued to worsten.

45 minutes later when I got my call and directed the AAA dispatch to my car on campus, the storm looked as close to a blizzard as I’d ever seen (of course I’ve only ever lived in Arizona, Texas, and Southern California, so that really isn’t saying much in the grand scheme of things).

“Whoa, how old is this battery?” he asked as he began his initial inspection.

“I don’t know.”

“It looks old,” he said. “It’s all corroded, let me test it and we’ll see if it’s completely dead or if it just needs a charge.”

He hooked up this meter thingy to the metal thingys on top and took some kind of reading.

“Well, it looks like you need a new battery.”

“Can you start it up so I can get somewhere, or is it completely dead?” I asked.

“I can start it up, but you can’t turn the car off again, or it might not turn back on.”

“Do you sell batteries?”

“Yes but I already sold yours today, plus my batteries will be a lot more expensive than what you could get at the store.”

We got my car running, I signed some paperwork, and then I climbed back in my car. As I was waiting for my back window to defrost, my boyfriend texted me back.

I’m so sorry, do you need me to pick you up?

I called him and updated him. We decided that I was going to pick him up and we were going to go to AutoZone to get a new battery. The snow was lashing around my windshield as I drove through the fog that was actually snow on my mission to get a new battery. Then finally we made it to AutoZone.

I gave the man the make, model, and year of my car. They had my battery and it was in stock. YAY!!!!!

I also was very fortunate that my boyfriend knew what to do as he borrowed an unscrewer tool thingy from AutoZone that made this clicking noise when he pulled it backward and proceeded to take my old battery out for the $5 battery fee thingy, and put the new battery in. $95 later, all was fixed.

I couldn’t help but laugh a little the entire time. Murphy’s Law was in action. Not only did my battery die, but it died during the middle of a winter storm. Not too much harm was done though. All of my classes were over for the day, so I wasn’t going to miss anything, I learned about how to change car batteries and what to do when your battery was dead, and I got it all fixed in a couple hours. I emerged from my challenge ready to meet a new one, which I did – finishing my Aircraft Structures II homework…

The view from the side of Granite Mountain

While most couples would enjoy a nice dinner and possibly a movie on Valentine’s Day, my boyfriend and I decided to go for a hike. A few of my friends thought the idea was kind of weird, but when you think about it, engineering students like me and my boyfriend are hardly typical.

Last weekend provided the first real opportunity to go hiking. I’ve been kept from hiking every other weekend this semester by inclement weather or newspaper production (as a section editor on the paper, I basically devote every other weekend to designing layout for our bimonthly paper).

Although I did have production on that weekend, we finished just after noon on Sunday and by 2:00 Sunday afternoon my boyfriend and I were standing at the beginning of the Metate Trailhead that leads up Granite Mountain.

Base of the trail

Granite Mountain is a majestic granite formation that is visible from most of campus, and the site of several close, beautiful hiking trails.

We only had about four hours until the parking lot would be closed at 6:00pm, so we set out to travel as far as we could up the mountain before turning back in two hours.

The weather was perfect. The sky was nearly cloudless, the breeze light, and the temperature a mild 50 degrees. We couldn’t have asked for anything better.

Granite mountain can be seen through the trees

The melting snow from this winter's storms created beautiful trickling streams around the mountain

The landscape was absolutely beautiful. Tall evergreens and smaller, bald deciduous trees lined both sides of the path. We marched along at a moderate pace, discussing our exciting hopes and plans for the future and exchanging childhood anecdotes.

View during the hike

We weren’t the only ones who had decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather on Valentine’s Day. Many other couples greeted us, smiling as we passed them.

One of the great things about hiking is that it is nearly impossible to be in a foul mood when you’re far from the stresses of real world life and surrounded by the beauty of nature and good company. Not one of the people that we passed was anything but pleasant, and it just added to the positivity of the trip.

When you are as busy and stressed as an engineering student in their junior or senior year of study, getting away from it all for a few hours on a beautiful hiking trail is nothing but a blessing. The Prescott campus is surrounded by beautiful hiking and climbing spots.

We didn’t quite make it all the way up the mountain, but we plan to return the next chance we have when the weather is beautiful and our weekend isn’t eaten up by production. As we got back into the car we turned to look back at the mountain through the trees and declared, “We’ll be back mountain! You may have conquered us today, but we’ll be back, and next time we’ll make it all the way to the top!”

The view of Granite Mountain as we reached our car

Don’t worry, we are not that crazy…it’s just like I said in the beginning, we’re engineers and therefore, a little quirky.

Part II:

This is a continuation. Part I described what a Rocket Scientist was like as a child and ended with a description how excited I was to go to Space Camp…

Years later my desire to work for NASA continued and I pursued and was offered a high school internship position at the Johnson Space Center during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. The high school internship was a lot like a scavenger hunt where we had to complete simple engineering projects, as well as set up our own tours and interviews with NASA employees. I met a few astronauts, as well as Embry-Riddle Prescott Alumni and Flight Director Norman Knight, and saw things that very few other people ever get a chance to see, like Mission Control, NASA robotics and moon rock laboratories.

This was my vantage point of Space Shuttle Mission Control when I sat behind the Flight Director desk. From this spot I was able to observe a training session for the mission that summer.

This is a picture of me in Space Shuttle Mission Control with the flight director desk behind me. This was taken during my high school internship

I had the opportunity to meet and take this picture of Space Shuttle Flight Director, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Prescott Graduate, Norman Knight during my high school internship. In the first picture I am standing next to his desk in Mission Control.

This is a picture of me and other high school interns next inside the NBL at JSC.

A second picture of the NBL from my internship.

A third picture of the NBL from my internship

This is a picture of me in the Quest Lab on the 3rd floor of the building that houses Mission Control, where I spent most of my time during my high school internship.

It was during my junior year of high school that I found Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and made it my first choice. I had to see the school that had a better Aerospace Engineering program than MIT and Caltech. I visited both Embry-Riddle campuses before I eventually decided on the Prescott campus.

To me, walking onto the Prescott campus felt like walking into my new home. I found that the people around campus and the people in town were exceptionally friendly. It didn’t take me more than a few seconds to fall in love with the landscape surrounding the campus either. In every direction I looked I could see mountains, and directly across the street from campus the Granite Dells stood majestically enticing me to hike and climb through them. The variety of the landscape was nothing like where I lived in Texas. In a thirty minute drive I was able to see a pine forest, high desert, awe-inspiring rock formations, mountains, and a lake. It was so breathtakingly beautiful.

This is a picture that I took from my dorm in 2008. You can see Hall 5 and the Dining hall on the right and the other dorms just below the horizon.

I was also excited to see all of the new facilities at the Prescott campus. In just the past few years the campus received the new King Engineering building, Academic Complex I, and the Aircraft Experimental Fabrication building. In addition, the new library and cafeteria were under construction when I visited. I walked through laboratories that nearly made my eyes pop out of my head. I saw incredible senior design projects that inspired admiration and respect. I spoke to professors that were so excited about the classes they taught and the success of their students that they were almost bubbly.

Later when Embry-Riddle came to a recruiting event in my hometown, my Admissions counselor not only remembered my name from my brief visit to campus, she remembered details that I had told her of my trip and other things we had spoken about. It was a great feeling to know that I was a person, rather than the number I was to the other universities that I had applied to.

Going to Embry-Riddle also played a key role in helping me to receive a paid position as a co-op at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. I received a call from the center offering me the position after I had given them a resume at the Embry-Riddle Industry and Career Expo months earlier. An interesting thing to note is that the other applicants were each interviewed over the phone before they were selected, while I was selected simply based off of my resume. Now I am a NASA employee on leave without pay until I return for my next co-op rotation and eventually to start my career after graduation.

These are the Spring 2009 DFRC Co-ops. I'm sitting on the sign on the right end. The girl four people to my right, Brittany Wells, is also an ERAU Prescott student. She will graduate and return to the center to start career this May.

This is another cool picture of me being goofy in the cockpit of the NASA 747 that carries the Space Shuttle back to the Kennedy Space Center after it lands in Edwards, CA.

Although I’m now 21, my 6-year-old self is still very close to my heart. I think that if I was able to meet her today (in a situation akin to what happened in the Disney film The Kid) she would be very excited and proud of what we have achieved. In addition to inspiring Mattel to create a Rocket Scientist Barbie and working on a project that one day becomes a NOVA documentary, one of my life’s goals is to always remain true to my six-year-old self; true to the six-year-old that decided she wanted to be a rocket scientist.

I'm finishing this two part blog, the way I started it, by remembering the aspirations that started on this trip to Space Center Houston when I was six years old.

Part I: The Beginning

“To thine own self be true.” – William Shakespeare

When people ask me how old I was when I figured out what I wanted to be, they usually aren’t prepared for my answer. I was six years old.

It all started when my family, residents of a suburb north of Houston, took a trip to the Johnson Space Center. My mom was into letting my sister and me dress ourselves even at the ages of 5 and 6. If I recall correctly, I was wearing a blue dress with white lacy socks and patent leather black shoes, while my sister was wearing a baby pink poodle skirt outfit that my cousin had sent her and white Keds.

This is a picture of me at Space Center Houston when I was six years old. It was taken on the historic day when I discovered my calling in life.

It was on that historic visit that I found what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life. As we left through the turnstiles that kept track of the number of visitors to the center, I proudly proclaimed to my parents, and anyone else who was exiting at closing time, “I am going to work for NASA one day.”

My parents thought it was an adorable childhood phase that I would one day grow out of. I never did. Well, there were a couple of times that I thought I might want to be something else. When Men in Black came out, the first PG-13 movie I saw in the theaters (a big deal to nine-year-old me), I wanted to be a Woman in Black. There was another period of about a month in the second grade when I was convinced that I’d be a paleontologist, and about 6 months in 8^th grade when I was exploring the idea of being an architect. Despite all of this, I continued to feel as though I was supposed to work for NASA.

When I was in the 4^th grade, I was the commander of our playground’s hemispherical jungle gym which was my spaceship and a couple of my friends and I would go on planetary exploration missions out of our ship to evaluate the alien life around us. I also turned my room into a spaceship in fourth grade. I got a large sheet of black plastic that I placed over my window and poked holes in it so that the constellations would shine into my room during the day when my lights were out. Then I replaced the lights in my ceiling fan with 25 watt blue lights.

I think the whole thing kind of weirded my mom out a bit, but she decided it was harmless and allowed me to continue entertaining myself with my own intergalactic missions that I conducted in my room. I was always really good at entertaining myself, and pride myself on continuing to have a strong, healthy imagination.

I was always a really nerdy kid. Starting in first grade at my elementary school, each class had a day and time once a week to visit the school library and check out books. It didn’t take me very long to find the science section. Each week I would bring home books about animals, dinosaurs, planets, etc. My mom grew very concerned. She called a conference with my first grade teacher about it.

“Kerianne keeps bringing home these books that are way over her reading level, and I’m afraid that she doesn’t know where the books that she can read are,” she told my first grade teacher.

At the next library session my teacher made me check out a Clifford book, and wouldn’t let me get the book on arctic seals that I wanted. I was so mad. When I got home, I jumped off the bus, stormed into my house, sat next to my mother, opened the book, and read the entire thing in a very deliberately agitated manner before closing the book and looking up at my mother in six-year-old rage.

“I have all the picture books that I need in my room, and I want to read science books. Why won’t you let me read science books?” I demanded of my mother.

“You can’t read all of the words in the science books,” my mother said in a cautiously apologetic tone.

“Maybe I can’t read all of the words, but I can read most of them, and I can figure out the rest, plus I can learn a lot from the pictures,” I said.

My mom and my teacher never made me check out another Clifford, Bernstein Bears, or other popular children’s books ever again.

In second grade they had this really cool interactive CD kit about the solar system at the book fair, and I begged my mother for it.

“There’s only one left!” I urged her.

I was exceptionally disappointed when it was gone the next day. My hopes and dreams were dashed and my need for knowledge of the solar system would never be satisfied. My mom told me years later that seeing my disappointment just about broke her heart, and she thought about giving me the CD then, but was glad when she could see my reaction on Christmas morning. That was a really cool CD. I found it when I was cleaning out a bunch of boxes over winter break and although it had never seen an operating system newer than Windows 95, I couldn’t bring myself to toss it.

All through elementary school I really wanted to go to Space Camp. When I was 11 I put together a MS PowerPoint presentation on the reasons why I thought my parents should send me to Space Camp. I felt I was pretty justified in my requests and somewhere between the adorableness of their 11-year-old with her PowerPoint and the desperate desire I expressed, my parents agreed to send me to Space Camp. I was so excited that I was counting down the days every day for 2 months.

Then after Space Camp, I practically lived in my flight suit for the rest of the summer. I still have it in my closet at home.

This is a picture of me, my sister and my cousin the summer after I went to space camp. I am the one in the flight suit from space camp and awesome sunglasses :). My sister is the one in the cheer leading outfit, and the normal looking one in the middle is my cousin. She's now a professional dancer on the New Jersey Nets dance team. I have never really been normal, but I'm as normal as my mother could get me to be. If it wasn't for her, I'd have no social skills or fashion sense (I might even still wear those horrible sun glasses), and my only hobby would be homework. 🙂

Stay tuned for Part II where I will tell you about how I found Embry-Riddle and started working for NASA…

I 

The road outside my apartment last Thursday. Maybe a few brave souls with snow and ice experience didn't mind braving the weather, but I, a born and bred Texan, decided to play it safe and chill out at home.

Back in Houston it never snowed, and I can't describe how magical it was to wake up to 3 inches of snow on the ground. It was actually the first time in my life that I had woken up to that much snow.

With that much snow on my back deck I decided to build a snow man. This Monday when I went back to class, my Psychology professor asked who had built a snow man during our days off. When I and a few others raised our hands she declared, "Look around everyone, these are the fun people."

Snowman again. Notice the NASA hat and Aviators - only a Riddle student would build a snowman like that.

And there is me in next to the snowman to prove that I was there.

My account of the Snow Days as documented  last Friday (my internet has been acting up, but all has been resolved):

In the past two days it has snow more in Prescott than it has in any other semester that I have attended Embry-Riddle. As a result today is the second day in a row that the campus has been closed for inclement winter weather.

If you know anything about weather forecasters, you may, like me, tend to take all of their predictions with a grain of salt. Since my time at Embry-Riddle, weather forecasters have predicted snowfalls in excess of 4-6 inches several times. My excited anticipation of a snow day was tangible on these occasions, only to be destroyed as throughout the night , the forecast changed to predict less and less snow until I awoke to a light dusting and a full day of classes.

Needless to say when the forecast predicted snow for the latter part of this week, I wasn’t going to fall for another weatherman crying wolf. No way! I went to bed unconvinced and prepared to go to my 7:45 a.m. class on Thursday morning.

When my alarm went off, it wasn’t the only beep my smart phone made. I had just received an email from the Executive Vice President Frank Ayers that the classes were canceled until 10:35 and that an update would be issued around 8:00 a.m. I was shocked. I jumped out of bed and ran to my deck to find 3 inches of snow.

So I asked myself, what would any self-respecting college student do now that they didn’t have class? Go back to sleep of course!

What did the update say? Due to extensive snow fall and dangerous driving conditions all classes would be canceled for Thursday, January 21, 2010. So I decided to build a snowman.

I used a spatula and spoon from my kitchen for the arms, my NASA baseball cap for a hat, the lid to a small pan for a smile, and my aviator sunglasses for the eyes. I named him Al, a facetious ode to Al Gore and the conviction with which he pushes his “Global Warming” beliefs.

Then I did something I never do. I spent the day watching movies. And it was wonderful.

Faced with a second day free of responsibility, I don’t know to do. Today is going to be a day of indulging hobbies.

NASA has found water on the Moon, and this is big news for the agency and space enthusiasts everywhere!

It seems a little funny to me that since my co-op at NASA, many people have come to regard my opinion on NASA missions much more highly than ever before, and some friends even look to me to me as a sort of expert on what NASA is doing.I tell someone that I work for NASA, and I suddenly become a representative of NASA that people will question about projects, missions, and NASA objectives.

Don’t get me wrong. I am quite flattered by this.I’m only worried that I won’t do NASA justice, because I’m not an expert on NASA, just an enthusiast.

When the news stations announced “NASA is bombing the Moon, and how much is this costing you?Watch tonight at 5,” I had several people ask me over the phone, or by electronic communications, what the point of this whole thing was and why we were spending so much money on it.

I am a huge proponent of manned space exploration, so for someone like me this mission was a huge deal.I am not an expert on LCROSS by any means, but I did know that the purpose was to investigate what resources lie on the moon, especially water that we could use to sustain a permanent lunar base that would provide a huge leap forward in prolonged human life on an extraterrestrial celestial body.This is the stuff that dreams are made of, and what I told most people about the mission.

Well, guess what?They found water!And not just a little water.Lots of WATER!And I, like many space enthusiasts today are exceptionally excited about this discovery.

We are also exceptionally excited about the recent successful flight test of the Ares I-X rocket, the potential launch vehicle for missions to the moon, including the set up of a lunar base.On the days leading up to the launch, there were many fellow astronautics track aerospace engineering students at Embry-Riddle that were itching with excitement over the rocket.I can’t tell you how many of my friends were telling me about the launch.It was almost like Christmas for us. Many of us would be ecstatic to work on the Constellation missions.

We can only hope that the powers that be in Washington are excited enough about these successes to support a manned mission to the moon.The fate of manned space exploration rests in their hands.

This is an exciting time for the “astro kids,” as the astronautics track students are often called.Ask just about any of them what they think about water on the moon or the Ares I-X rocket, and I bet you’ll find that they’re excitement is palpable.We can see that we are making huge steps of progress towards the moon, and it is an amazing feeling!

Some news stories for additional information:

Ares I-X launch:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091028125147.htm

I’m assuming that most of my readers are perspective college students, who are likely all to be over achievers to some degree. This is for you. See if this describes how you think.

My most valuable asset is time. That is because of all of my possessions, time seems to be what I have the least amount of.

Someone once asked me how I could consider time a possession. “No one can own time,” they said. I disagree. I believe that each and every person is given a certain amount of time, and just like with money, how they decide to spend it defines who they become as a person.

In the Gospels of Mark and Luke, there is a parable about a poor woman who gives two mites to the church when people who are far richer give far more. In the parable she is portrayed as giving the most, because while the others give out of their abundance, she gives all that she has out of her destitution.

Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not exceptionally religious, and I definitely am not trying to push my views on anyone, but I do consider myself to be spiritual, and I am fascinated by nearly all religions. The reason that I bring that parable up is that it expresses how I feel about time. I have so little time that whenever I choose to spend time on homework, working, or with another person, it is because I find that cause worthwhile.

My lack of time is only exacerbated by my tendency towards over achieving. I feel as though if I am not filling all of my time with something worthwhile that is making me grow as a person, than I am not living up to my full potential and I find that lack of fulfillment difficult deal with that. I often feel as though I have to justify getting a full night’s sleep, or taking the time to make myself a decent dinner, because I know that I could be doing homework, or reading, or writing, or otherwise strengthening my mind.

I guess you could say that I live with a sense of purpose. Everything that I do must have a purpose; otherwise I likely won’t do it.

This personality characteristic works fairly well in a typical work or vacation setting, where I work my set number of hours, and then go home each evening and have weekends free. I see new places, meet new people, read about new concepts, gain new experiences, and work on projects that preserve the memories of those times.

The problems with this perspective occur during the school year.

The way that an engineering program usually works is that you will spend approximately 15 hours a week in classes, and then for each hour you spend in class, you will spend about two hours outside of class working on homework. This isn’t necessarily true your freshman year, when you will likely spend less than 10 hours a week outside of class, but as you progress in your degree program, that amount of time increases dramatically. I predict that I currently spend about 20-30 hours a week on homework or studying outside of class as a junior; sometimes it’s more, sometimes a little less. Then I’m in extracurricular activities.

Engineering students don’t work 8-10 hours a day then finish for the day. They usually break up their study/homework time throughout the week, to accommodate classes and extracurricular activities. This results in many long nights and weekends of study.

When my time is already consumed by engineering classes, for some reason, I still feel the need to fill any spare moment I have with something productive.

My dad offered the following advice for thinking about relaxation in a productive way:

“BALANCE is the key.

The human body is a machine and as with any machine, it requires maintenance and care to keep it running in top condition.  A scheduled maintenance period is mandatory or the machine will break down.   To use an automobile reference, it’s not just a matter of putting in new oil and wiper blades; it must be washed, waxed, vacuumed, conditioned and generally taken “off-line” to keep it in top condition.  This needs to be planned and scheduled on a regular basis.  If you skip the maintenance, the downtime gets longer for the next time you attempt to get it maintained AND you run the risk of it breaking down on you before the next maintenance period comes along.  The harder you push the machine to perform, the more often you need to take it off-line for maintenance.  All machines have a “duty cycle rating” as well.  The stronger they are built the harder they can work, but that is a story for another day…”

Over the summer I had the opportunity to visit The Getty museum in Los Angeles during my internship. I went with one of my close friends who is a NASA aerodynamics, propulsion, and flow physics engineer at the Dryden Flight Research Center. As we were exploring their masterfully designed gardens, he stopped suddenly in front of me.

“I think it is really important for engineers to do this,” he said as he bent over to smell a rose in front of him. I stepped forward and joined him. And there we stood, two aerospace engineers, in the middle of the gardens at The Getty in Los Angeles, taking time to smell the roses.

One of the important lessons that I have learned since I’ve been in college is that sometimes you do really need to just stop and take time to smell the roses.

I’ve been considering doing this blog for a while now.  The intention of this blog entry is to describe the aerospace engineering degree and it’s effects on student’s from my own perspective.  And how else would an engineer illustrate a concept, other than through a serious of graphs?  I wouldn’t say it’s sugar coated, but when you think about it, do you really expect rocket science to be easy?

None of the graphs in this blog entry can be backed up by scientific evidence.  I created each of them in MS Paint to reflect my own limited observations.

And what does chocolate cake have to do with any of this? Well, someone asked me if I liked my major.  My initial reaction was “sometimes,” but then I really thought about it and tried to come up with an analogy that other people could understand-an analogy devoid of technical jargon. This is what I came up with:

Homework is like chocolate cake.  I love chocolate cake, especially the super sweet milk chocolate with milk chocolate icing.  Pure, simple, and exceptionally delicious chocolate cake.  Even when I’m completely full, if you put a slice of chocolate cake down in front of me, I will eat it, and I will savor each and every bite.  However, if you were to place a 5 layer, 12 inch diameter, chocolate cake in front of me and instruct me to eat it within an hour, that chocolate cake suddenly becomes daunting rather than mouthwatering. That’s how I feel about homework. More specifically engineering homework.  I actually like solving the difficult problems that my professors assign me for practice, but when a combination of assignments accumulates into a daunting task, it reaches a point where it becomes too much.  Often times engineering homework becomes too much of a good thing.

Only a true nerd could compare homework to chocolate cake.

With that, I will begin delving into my own personal analysis of the engineering curriculum, with handy-dandy graphs to illustrate my theories.

As you can see in the graph above, the difficulty of your classes increases dramatically over time.  One might ask what these mysterious Gauntlet Classes are.  Well, the typical engineering student encounters a semester of classes which many engineering students refer to as “The Gauntlet.”  These classes may include a combination of the following: Solid Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aerodynamics 1.  Some students can decrease the slope of the difficulty increase by splitting “The Gauntlet” up over semesters, but inevitably, after completing “The Gauntlet,” the level of difficulty in engineering classes remains rather constant.

Engineering classes start off relatively easy with the basics such as math, physics and humanities requirements. For me, a veteran of an intense magnet program and multiple AP classes in high school, freshman year was actually easier than what I had experienced during my Junior and Senior year of high school.  It wasn’t at all what I expected.  I wasn’t really complaining, but I was a little surprised because I had expected college to be a lot harder, and it kind of lured me into a false sense of security.

Then, because of all of my AP credits, I took “The Gauntlet” at the beginning of my sophomore year, minus Aero 1, which I am taking now.  It was as though the engineering program was laughing at me and cackling “Ha! Tricked you! You thought it was going to be easy, huh?  Well, here is the real stuff! Welcome to engineering!”  The jump in difficulty that I experienced during the first semester of my sophomore year was what I had originally expected from engineering, just about a year delayed.

“The Gauntlet” is by no means impossible, but it will likely be the most difficult semester you will ever encounter in engineering, mostly because you have to get used to the sudden difficulty and time devotion increase.  After “The Gauntlet,” classes remain difficult, but you aren’t going through that transition period any more.  You get used to it, and you adapt to accommodate the changes.

For the most part, the engineering faculty and academic advisers are well aware of the challenges and adjustments required to make it through “The Gauntlet” and they will do the best to help you succeed.

In my own personal experience from what I have seen of the engineering world outside of school, after graduation your work load and difficulty decrease significantly.  A career in engineering is by no means easy, but it is not nearly as difficult as being a student who spends about 16 weeks on in an intense load of courses and homework consisting of 4-6 different topics before switching to a new set of 4-6 topics with an entirely different set of professors who have different expectations and styles that you have to get used to all over again.  Then there is simply the shear load of homework.

Many engineering students spend the majority of their evenings and weekends doing homework. When they become full time engineers, they usually get their nights and weekends back.  For about the first month of my co-op, I had no idea what to do with all the extra time, but I quickly found activities to fill them.

Final Exams are just about the most stressful and challenging academic weeks for both students and professors.  During one week you will be required to present your understanding of all of the new subjects that you have learned about during the previous 15 weeks, in a format that pleases that particular professor the most.

You will have many performance evaluations and presentations during your engineering career to stress about but in my very limited experience, they are no where near as stressful as final exams.  As far as performance evaluations go, if you are anything like me, and simply can’t give less than your best on a day to day basis, your supervisor will notice that, and you don’t need to worry about performance evaluations.  As far as presentations go, usually you will create your own presentation and it will be on a topic that you are very comfortable with.  The presentations are done on your terms, which makes them much less stressful than final exams, where you are often guessing what you think your professor thinks is most important.

From what I have seen in the engineering world, you work on a specific set of projects in a certain direction for an extended period of time.  You have only a few supervisors to get used to and you don’t usually have to get used to a new set of leadership every 16 weeks.  It will differ from job to job, and if you are working on a high profile, priority project with quick deadlines, your work could be much more difficult than what I have generalized.

As you can see in the graph above, the amount of free time that an engineering student has as they progress in their degree decreases dramatically over time.  When comparing this graph to the first graph, Engineering Degree Difficulty vs. Time, the correlation is unmistakable.  Of course if the only thing that you do is school, and you don’t join in extracurricular activities (which isn’t as uncommon as you might think for super nerdy, socially inept engineers), you will have more free time than is represented in the graph above.

The biggest drop in enrollment in the engineering degree program that I have observed has been freshman year, when the first round of students realize, “Hey, I was confused, I don’t really want to do this. It wasn’t what I thought it would be.”  Then the rate decreases until the end of “The Gauntlet.”  If an engineer makes it though “The Gauntlet,” they are usually committed to sticking out the rest of the degree.

During orientation at many large universities, a representative from the college of engineering will tell the engineering freshman to look to their left and then their right before announcing that two out of every three students will not graduate from the engineering program.  Although this drop out is not nearly as dramatic at Riddle, many of the students who initially begin engineering do not complete it.

I believe that the drop rate is lower than the traditional rate because a student doesn’t usually come to Embry-Riddle unless they are exceptionally passionate about aerospace, and usually that passion can help a person get through the most difficult of challenges.

Why do people drop engineering?  Well, primarily for the reasons in the first two graphs.  They can see how difficult the path is before them and they decide that they want to go a different route.  Others realize that they don’t like math and physics as much as they thought when confronted with a full schedule of math and science classes.  I don’t really know all the reasons, but those are the two most common reasons I hear.

What happens to the drop outs?  Well, some of them go home.  They attend community college to find out what they really want to do, or go straight to another university if they already know what their new passion is.  Some students, who have already established themselves at Embry-Riddle and do not wish to switch universities, switch to less challenging majors such as Global Security and Intelligence Studies, or Aviation Business, or Aeronautical Science.  None of these majors are easy, but as the engineers like to say,  “they aren’t exactly rocket science,” and if they still have a passion for aerospace, though not necessarily for engineering, it allows them to pursue their passions from a different direction.

After your sophomore year, your general engineering classes are pretty much done, and you begin to get into engineering courses for your specific engineering degree, which should increase in interest and complexity. During my last space mechanics class we analyzed how the trajectories of the lunar landing missions of the late 60s and early 70s were designed.  How cool is that?  Classes only become more interesting as  you reach your senior year and you combine all of the concepts that you have learned into two courses that simulate a complete aircraft or spacecraft mission in the case of aeronautics and astronautics, respectively.

When I was at NASA, a fellow engineer reminded me that for aerospace engineers “the sky is not the limit,” a play on the phrase “the sky’s the limit.”  The kind of projects that you will work on as an engineer are pretty much epic in their level of awesomeness.  You could design a cutting edge, primarily composite commercial aircraft, or work on the spacecraft or station that will make human habitation on the moon possible.  Whatever you work on, you will realize that all of the hard work that you put in during college was well worth it.