My activity was to participate in an Internship Programme for aerospace engineering. It was a demonstration of Creativity. I participated in an Internship Programme by Inverted Prism from 21st November 2020 to 6th December 2020. We were divided into groups and were supposed to come up with a design for a space shuttle which would orbit Titan, the moon of Saturn. The main idea of an Internship is to learn about your future career which will help you foresee what it looks like. Participating in the Internship Programme helped me build my social skills and research and also helped me understand what my career will look like.
Learning Outcomes
Learning Outcome 2: Demonstrate challenges have undertaken, developing new skills in the process
This was a challenge as it was the first time I was participating in an internship programme which required group work. All of us had to work collaboratively and we had frequent meetings in order to discuss our mission and the design of the spacecraft. We divided tasks among ourselves and took regular feedback from each other. I also developed research skills because this was something new to me, so I had to research it.
Learning Outcome 3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
We were not told about our tasks so that we could do some prior research, but we had 2 weeks to create a design and fit it according to the Falcon 9 model. I was particularly new to this topic, so I had to do a lot of research after the first session in order to be at par with my groupmates.
Learning Outcome 4: Show commitment and perseverance towards CAS
I did a lot of research and I was given tough instruments, which were also very important to our mission, like the Solar Wind Particle Analyser (SWA), the Heat/Thermal Sensor and the Laser Altimeter. The SWA was in particular very tough and required a lot of research because it required high level physics concepts which were not catered to during the time.
Learning Outcome 5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
As I mentioned previously, we had to work in groups and had to put aside our differences in order to work together, we had a lot of debate on what instruments to choose, like should we choose a camera which captures high resolution images or a camera which captures wide-angle images and should we use a unidirectional high speed radar or a multi-directional low speed radar. In the end, it all came together well, because we worked collaboratively.
To conclude, it was a really enlightening experience and I would definitely do it again. I used the Learner Profile of Inquirer as I researched about the topics I did not know about, and not only surfaced but went to the root causes and topics.
