NASA Novice: Senior Megan Collins interned for NASA over the summer

When senior Megan Collins clicked on the email from NASA in her inbox, she fully expected to read the opening sentence of a rejection letter, given the competitiveness of the program and her high hopes. So it took her by surprise when the email read:

On behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), we are pleased to inform you that you have been selected for an internship at Marshall Space Flight Center.

“I was so shocked, I really couldn’t believe it,” Collins said. “I just kind of sat there for a while and stared at it and thought, ‘Wow, I can’t believe my luck!’”

The acceptance letter brought her closer to her dream of launching rockets at NASA, rather than model rockets in her backyard. Despite challenges due to COVID-19, she ultimately got the opportunity to prototype a NASA automated sun visor — a computer-automated visor that dims when the computer tells it to do so. 

But luck wasn’t the only factor in her acceptance — Collins had been working towards one of those coveted 1,000 nationwide internship spots for years. She’d taken three engineering classes at East, passed the required government background check and applied for every NASA internship position available to high schoolers this summer. 

Another factor was a connection she made at NASA before she applied — Engineer Paul Tatum. She had reached out to Tatum, not with the intention of landing a job, but to ask questions and learn from him. He then went on to urge her to apply for an internship.

“He actually recommended that I go after paid internships,” Collins said. “I was just thinking, ‘You know, I would pay to get to work for NASA.’”

The initial internship plan was for Collins to work as a lab assistant at Marshall Space Flight Center in both a clean room and cryogenic chamber — a contaminant-free lab for manufacturing sensitive equipment and a low temperature testing environment.

But then, the pandemic struck. About a month after receiving her acceptance letter, she was informed by email that her original internship had been canceled, and she’d been reassigned to a new project.

“I think I cried — yeah, I was really bummed,” Collins said. “I was kind of scared too because the second project I was assigned to was going to be a lot harder than the first one.”

As opposed to working on one of the main mission projects, her new project was a remote New Technology Report (NTR), which required skills in an area she had little experience with: computer science. She’d now be working independently at home to prototype a NASA employee’s idea for a new invention, which would eventually be reviewed by NASA and potentially patented. 

Collins worked on her NTR by developing an automated sun visor to improve the safety of Earth — and someday space — vehicles. She automated electrochromic glass, a type of glass that changes between tinted or not tinted when you apply a voltage to it, using a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, which is essentially a mini computer.

Together, the whole system was a big grid of electrochromic glass panels, with each one individually wired to the Raspberry Pi. If the sun came through one of the panels, an individual panel could be dimmed while keeping the rest of the glass clear. 

“It was great because I had liberties as to how I wanted to solve the problem,” Collins said. “When I would encounter a barrier, I had people I could turn to who were experts in the field.”

Collins’ internship was originally supposed to last for only 10 weeks. However, she accepted a two-week extension to continue making adjustments to the automated sun visor to lessen the amount of data it had to process, completing the project in August.

“If anything, I think [my remote internship] benefited me more because my skills in computer science were probably my weakest link before this internship,” Collins said. “I feel like my skills have grown so much because of it.”

Collins grew up with the dream of working for NASA. When she was a few months old, Collins’ mom Kate Conrad could tell that her daughter had a more analytical view of the world based on how mesmerized Collins was by the tree shadows on their front room window.

In contrast to her twin sister, Collins was much more interested in dinosaurs, “Star Wars” and Legos than princesses and dolls. Whenever she’d accompany her mom on business trips to the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. or when they’d take family trips to the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Collins excitedly engaged with the exhibits unlike her sister. 

“She always had an interest in numbers and being very precise with them,” Collins’ stepdad Andy Haun said. “She wasn’t interested in just solving the math problems, but also figuring out the best way to solve them.”

Jennifer Horn, Collins’ Honors Precalculus teacher from last year, helped Collins with her internship application by writing her a letter of recommendation. According to Collins, Horn challenged and supported her in a way that allowed her to do well in Pre-Calc, while further developing her passion for math.

“As quiet as [Collins] is, she took it upon herself to do this internship,” Horn said. “Most kids that are a little on the shy side probably wouldn’t even attempt it, which makes you understand her passion for STEM and how much she wanted to get involved in it.”

Although the work she did for her internship was computer-based with Electrical Engineering, Collins aspires to pursue Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech — and from there, NASA.

“We’ve been laughing because when she got the internship, they welcomed her to the NASA team,” Conrad said. “Prior to that, she really didn’t have a lot of work experience. She was walking dogs. She’s gone from dog walker to NASA intern, and she couldn’t be happier.”