December 2, 2015
The Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin offers its congratulations to our Fall 2015 graduates. We look forward to seeing what our ASE/EM Longhorns do next as they set out to change the world, and encourage them to keep in touch over the years.
While we can’t feature all of our student successes, below are two examples of students who have made the most of their engineering education by taking an active role in their learning, once again proving that in UT Aerospace, the sky is not the limit!
Natalie Maka, who is graduating with a B.S. in aerospace engineering, plans to continue her outreach to inspire young girls to enter STEM fields. Her first two years at UT Austin were spent as member of the Women in Aerospace for Leadership and Development (WIALD) student organization. With WIALD, she worked on the high altitude balloon launch, in which the group designed, built and tested multiple payloads and launched them aboard a weather balloon called a BalloonSat over 100,000 feet.
In 2014 Maka participated in WIALD’s experiment that tested thermal properties of Vectran, a highly heat-resistant filamentous material, aboard NASA’s reduced gravity aircraft. For her, this experience would remain unforgettable. Once gravity stopped pulling her down, she said, it seemed that the side of the aircraft she was sitting against had become the ceiling. Once her brain began to decipher what was going on, she finally comprehended that she was experiencing zero gravity.
“I am forever thankful to everyone who supported WIALD and I learned so much in one short year,” she said. “I love thinking back to that flight not only because it was an once-in-a-lifetime experience and I had learned so much, but because it fills me with appreciation.”
Maka also worked on Dr. Armand Chaput’s undergraduate research team developing software for a structural analysis module of Vehicle Sketch Pad. Her hands-on work led her to obtain her first internship at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth, TX and another at Cessna in Wichita, KS.
After graduation, Makaplans on working in the industry and would like to continue her graduate education.
Luke Bury, who will graduate with a B.S. in aerospace engineering, has hopes of one day finding aliens and giving back to his home state of South Dakota. As a student he has taken advantage of many hands-on opportunities.
From 2014-2015, Bury was the president of the UT Austin Students Chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). As a research assistant in the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory (TSL), where he has worked in since 2014, he constructed solar panels, prepared and integrated hardware, modeled spacecraft environments and instruments for both the RACE and ARMADILLO missions. He said that although it is strange to have as a “favorite” memory, it took him some time to appreciate the explosion of the Orb-3 rocket that carried the TSL’s RACE satellite in October of 2014.
“That explosion gave us all a direct taste of the universal theme of the space industry—
space is hard, and even if you do everything right it's not promised to work,” he said. “I felt, and still feel, very connected to the whole of mankind's history in space because of that explosion. We're all trying together.”
Bury’s education at UT Austin has taught him how to research and breakdown subject matter that is outside of his comfort zone, he said, while the astronautic track has taught him an important skill that can be applied to many areas of his life, which is to think of every possible aspect of a problem or mission.
He received the 2015 Cockrell School of Engineering Student Leadership Award and spent the summer interning at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
