The Hitchhiker's Guide to Internships: My Experiences Interning at NASA
By: Hari A Parthasarathy
Tags: Life Lessons, High School, NASA, Internships, Experience

Hari Parthasarathy

Life Lessons from my internship at NASA

Along with the technical expertise, my internship also helped benefit my soft skills and provided me with many life lessons. I had to cope with managing my school coursework with my internship coursework. I had to look at opportunity costs and tradeoffs. I created my own deadlines. I had to persist, and learn about research techniques. The most important of my life lessons were gaining experience working in a real-world environment. Below are some of my takeaways:

Life Lesson 1: Adjusting to a real-life workplace

This internship was my first time working in a large company workplace, and Covid-related challenges made it even more of a unique and new experience for me. It took me some time to adjust to the formalities of working in a citizen-based agency: the privacy and security policies, and other processes in setting up my work computer, working with internship coordinators, etc. My experiences helped me understand how systematic processes help large organizations onboard new employees and taught me about the complexity and diversity in real-world companies.

Life Lesson 2: Dual Workload: Managing coursework with internship work

Because of covid-19 pushing out all summer internships, NASA was nice enough to offer the virtual internship program (VIP) during Fall. However, this needed me to manage both my coursework schedule as a high schooler and the internship schedule. This meant lots of time management and juggling of activities. Having to balance the internship with my school schedule taught me the value of effective decision-making and analyzing tradeoffs. Sometimes, I had to miss attending NASA’s fun intern events in favor of math test preparation or miss an opportunity to showcase my creative design skills to finish a science assessment. Overall, the internship helped strengthen my decision-making skills and provide me with experience that I can carry with me when I enter college.

Life Lesson 3: Opportunity Costs and Tradeoffs: Realizing that I can’t do everything, and choosing the best activities to pursue

Building off the previous life lesson, this internship helped me realize that I can’t do everything, no matter how much I want to do them. There are only 24 hours in a day, and even the most efficient time management is still going to leave out a large chunk of the activities I would want to be done in those 24 hours. At the end of the day, something’s got to give! I learned this life lesson the hard way: during the first week of the internship, I tried to attend both NASA events and my classwork in a futile attempt to make a compromise. However, as my school homework started to pile up, I realized that I would have to adapt to an internship during a school year and reduce my involvement in intern events and balance these with schoolwork. This also showed me how to analyze opportunity costs and trade-offs as I had to make effective plans that often had me skipping breaks and analyzing which activities were high priority or urgent.

Life Lesson 4: Designing Deadlines: Creating and executing effective plans

My mentor provided me with total freedom in terms of coming up with the topics that I wanted to explore during my internship. This meant that I could research topics that I was comfortable with, but it came with consequences: I had to set the pacing and tempo for the internship. At first, I was afraid since I wasn’t sure if the deadlines I set were too ambitious, or too far into the future, but as I began to explore the realm of systems thinking and understand the time it took to complete reports and research papers, I became more attuned to the amount of time required for me to accomplish certain tasks. Through this experience, I was able to set achievable goals and make more effective plans that I could execute.

Life Lesson 5: Try Again: Learning the value of persistence.

This internship was my first time working in a large organization like NASA and on a research project. I had previously worked with a doctor associated with Stanford (bit.ly/HariSummer19) and had also done some development for a robotics startup (http://www.zdemy.com/courses/Intro-to-Evolutionary-Bio ) but they were very different. For this internship, I had to learn how to read and understand complex technical papers and formulate research questions and hypotheses. I also had to contact many other researchers to get pointers to their work or software. Some were kind enough to respond to an enthusiastic high schooler, but many did not. But through these, I was able to learn the value of persistence and patience, which I think is a very important skill for everyone.

Learning how to get a nice internship

Talking to my mentor and looking at other interns, I realized that there were a few common themes about how to get a prestigious internship like NASA. Below is a compilation of some of these themes:

Tip 1: Don’t be afraid to take risks

The first step to a potential internship is to not be afraid to take risks. Cold email someone. Ask your friends or their parents. Introduce yourself and broaden your network. Nothing will magically appear if you don’t show the initiative to make things happen, so feel free to put yourself out there.

Tip 2: Don’t be discouraged

The second step is to not be discouraged. Sometimes you may get lucky and get a response. Other times, you may have to patiently nudge someone until they respond, and yet other times, you may have to give up and shift your attention to some other internship. Although it may be disappointing at first, the key is to have perseverance and continue to look for opportunities.

Tip 3: Capitalize on opportunities

An apple in hand is worth two in the bush. Do not keep waiting for something exotic. When you already are presented with opportunities, they often only come once. When you have the opportunity to do something interesting, capitalize on it. That being said, you should always look at the tradeoffs and opportunity costs of each decision you make.