A NASA official said Florida A&M’s students are ideal for internships, fellowships and scholarships at the agency.
“We have some great students that come from here,” said Josephine Pereira, recruitment manager for Nassau County Space Center and Pathways Internship program.
“Deonte and Gerard [former FAMU graduates working at NASA] are doing well. When that happens, managers say, ‘I need more students like that.’ When somebody is doing well, we keep coming back to that school.”
For more than two years, NASA has offered co-op programs such as its Pathways Internship Employment Program (IEP) for interested students and college graduates.
Every seat was filled and people were standing as students and faculty gathered in the President’s Dining Room Tuesday to meet with NASA employees for an informal question and answer reception. The meeting was one day out of a weeklong campus event to recruit FAMU students.
Once the reception began, a panel of guest speakers who were FAMU alumni discussed their journey from college graduates to a career working for NASA.
“I’m a supervisor and really enjoy my job,” said Gina Henderson, Ph.D., a branch chief in the systems engineering division at NASA and the first graduate with a master’s degree from FAMU’s engineering school. “You can get high on the branch chain and still get to interact with other engineers.”
After twenty years, Henderson is now at the peak of her career at NASA and plans to continue the momentum, although people usually retire at 30 years she said.
Amber Ervin, a third-year computer science student from Miami, interned at the Kennedy Space Center through the Solar Program and said actually working at the workforce was her best experience. read more…
