My WISH Was Granted! by Haleigh

My WISH Was Granted! by Haleigh - March 2014 Scholarship Essay

Earning my WISH Aerospace Scholar award is one of my academic accomplishments that makes me very proud. The WISH program is run by NASA to promote girls interested in STEM. I first had to apply to the program and once selected I completed an 8 lesson online course about NASA over 4 months. I am not one of those kids that gets all school work easily, this was a lot of work, I spent as much time on those lessons as I did my classes in high school. I remember having to plot a re-entry slope for launching something from Earth to Mars as one of the assignments. That is a lot of math! The top 80 girls out of the over 300 that participated were selected for the summer experience. As one of the top 80, I got to go to the Johnson Space Center for a whole week this past July to learn from NASA specialists and compete in a robotics and research competition. I remember jumping around our house at 11 o’clock at night because we could not believe that I was selected. We were split into teams of 10 and at the end of the week my team was awarded second place. It was an amazing opportunity to learn more about NASA and meet some amazing people. It also lead to some amazing accomplishments including that my name will be on the Orion space craft when it launches in 2014.

After NASA, I started my own mission to inspire. This year I have multiple pieces planned out to inspire young girls to take an interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). The first part is public speaking. My school has “Space Day” where several speakers come in and talk about engineering and space and this year, I will be one of those speakers. I am going to give two lectures about the importance of STEM. These presentations are completely written and created by me to begin my goal of inspiration. I also developed a Girls Middle School Engineering Camp that we just completed. It was fantastic, I think the girls had some of the same feeling I had when I went to NASA, that they saw that girls can do math and science too. Several of them decided to sign up for engineering classes in the Middle and High school for next year. It was great, especially since I have been only one of two girls taking engineering classes since I have been in high school.

This one academic achievement, being selected to go to NASA has set my course both academically by choosing to be an Aerospace Engineer, and personally, by me making sure I have more female engineers to work with in the future.