Extraordinary Students, Out-of-this-world Opportunities
What can you do with a CU-Boulder aerospace engineering major? The opportunities are limitless. From working with the space program to reprogramming rocket propulsion software, our undergraduates enjoy the unique chance to participate in hands-on research and real-world internships during their CU-Boulder careers—making them highly desirable professionals even before they complete their degrees.
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Farheen Rizvi |  |
Travis Schafhausen |
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Lindsay Marek |  |
Kevin Eberhart |
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Rob Witoff |  |
Kristina Wang |
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Nathan Calvert |
Undergraduate Student Profiles
Farheen Rizvi
Senior
Farheen has made the most—and then some—of her first two years as an aerospace engineering student. A prestigious Goldwater Scholarship recipient, she has participated in a variety of research projects with the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, the Center for Aerospace Structures, and the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research. These hands-on research experiences have helped her gain fluency with software programs like MATLAB, PYTHON, IDL, C++, Java, and Satellite Tool Kit and build a real-world understanding of motion modeling, satellite mission operations, flight dynamics, and global positioning systems.
Because of her experience, Farheen was selected for the summer 2007 NASA Academy after just two years as a college student—an amazing achievement. She was one of over 2,000 applicants—mostly juniors, seniors, and graduate students—for just 50 NASA Academy spots and was one of only 17 students selected for Goddard Space Flight Center, the most competitive appointment.
During her NASA Academy experience, Farheen conducted flight dynamics analysis on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Spacecraft (due to launch in late 2008) to determine when, where, and how orbital corrections will need to be made to prevent the spacecraft—which is designed to fly at a low altitude as it circles the moon—from crashing into the lunar surface. She also enjoyed the incredible experience of traveling to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where she saw the underside of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, met CU-Boulder aerospace alum and astronaut Steve Swanson, and witnessed the Atlantis launch from the runway—as close as you can get without being at Mission Control.
Beyond her many academic and research pursuits, Farheen is also an active member of numerous campus organizations, including the Women in Engineering Program, Multicultural Engineering Program, and Muslim Student Association. While she enjoys intellectual pursuits such as thinking about philosophy and the intersections between religion, society, and science, Farheen also likes to spend her time cooking, hiking, biking, and playing ultimate Frisbee.
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Travis Schafhausen
Senior
Entering his third year as a CU-Boulder aerospace engineering major and computer engineering minor, Travis has already gained as much practical job experience as many typical aerospace engineering graduate students. During summer 2007, he worked in the Air Force Research Laboratory Propulsion Directorate, Space and Missile Propulsion Division, Motors Branch at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where—due to bad weather at Kennedy Space Center in Florida—he was fortunate one day enough to witness and send a personal account the landing of the Space Shuttle Atlantis.
While at Edwards Air Force Base, Travis worked with the BAllistic Test and Evaluation System (BATES) Performance Program—a large computer program that calculates performance parameters from experimental data and theoretical performance numbers via thermo-chemical analysis and then stores the results in a database. The BATES program has been the standard for testing of solid rocket motors for the military for over 50 years—providing a standard grain, casing, and nozzle geometry so that other performance parameters may be isolated and studied in more detail.
Travis's job involved assisting in the translation of the BATES program from its original Fortran/C to JAVA. He spent most of his time implementing the database interface so the code could read the necessary database input parameters to complete performance calculations and update the database with the new entries—the type of complex, real-world experience that will make him highly competitive in the job market when he completes his degree.
"Beyond his studies, Travis is an avid skier who made it to the slopes every weekend during his freshman year and traveled with the CU Ski and Snowboard Club to Austria for spring break in 2007. His other interests and activities include photography and membership in the Colorado Beta Chapter of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society, and the CU-Boulder Chapter of Sigma Gamma Tau, the national aerospace engineering honor society.
Lindsay Marek
Senior
Lindsay came to CU-Boulder to pursue her childhood dream of working in the field of human space flight, a dream she published an essay about in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Aviation (AIAA) Houston Horizons online magazine.
She has followed her dream relentlessly since arriving at CU-Boulder, aggressively seeking and finding opportunities with NASA to expand her knowledge and gain experience in research related to human space exploration. In 2005, she served as a Station Operations Planning Student Trainee with NASA’s Johnson Space Center Cooperative Education Program in Houston, Texas, receiving the Outstanding Co-op Award after serving as flight controller for the Real-time Planning Engineer Support console position for the International Space Station. In 2006, she worked at NASA again, this time receiving the Outstanding Co-op Award for her work as Advanced Extravehicular Activity Student Trainee. In 2007, she once again received the Outstanding Co-op Award, in this case for her work developing a Shuttle launch day ice trajectory analysis tool and computational fluid dynamics research.
In addition to her wealth of NASA experience, Lindsay has also played a leadership role on campus and in the community, serving with the University of Colorado Honor Code as a juror and investigator, as well as helping to introduce prospective students to the College of Engineering and Applied Science as an engineering ambassador. In her remaining time outside of classes, she volunteers for Habitat for Humanity and serves as an elementary school mentor, in addition to participating actively in the Women in Engineering Program.
Kevin Eberhart
MS, Aerospace Engineering, May 2008BS, Aerospace Engineering, May 2007
In addition to the rigorous academic goal of earning both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, spring 2008 graduate Kevin Eberhart played varsity football for the Buffs throughout his time at CU. “It was demanding and I knew what I was supposed to do every minute,” said Kevin. “But I have to say it was a lot of fun.”
Kevin grew up near Boulder and remembers as a child “sitting with my parents watching CU play football.” Also he was avidly interested in rockets and space. By high school he realized that, in addition to a great football team, CU-Boulder had “an aerospace program second to none.” He applied and was accepted on a full football scholarship.
The capstone of the Aerospace Engineering undergraduate program is a group senior project. Kevin’s project, the Self Organizing Aerial Reconnaissance System (SOARS), was to design and construct an autonomous aerial vehicle and build its corresponding electronics to enable remote imaging of a series of GPS targets. In addition to incorporating principles of mathematics and engineering, he said that this project gave him an understanding of project management and systems engineering.
“It’s difficult to convey how rewarding this was. Our team spent probably eight months before we got that first target image,” Kevin said. “Then you get that image, it just pops up on your computer, and that makes all the stress, all the late nights, worth it somehow.”
“What makes the senior project possible is that there’s so much interaction with the professors. I think it’s unique. I’ve visited a lot of other schools and it’s not like that—you don’t have that direct dialog with professors.”
For his master’s degree, Kevin worked in Professor David Klaus’s Lunar Module and Analog Research Station (LunarMARS) Program, whose purpose is to evaluate the potential of novel technologies for extravehicular activities on the moon. LunarMARS also built a full-scale mockup of a lunar module at the Engineering Center. Their research is conducted to aid NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration and students work in collaboration with local companies such as SpaceDev and Lockheed Martin.
Kevin helped with LunarMARS from its inception. Specifically, he explored possible solutions for lateral separation of adjoined modules on the lunar surface. He explains, “When astronauts go to the lunar surface, the vehicle they travel in is going to have many modules—an airlock module, a habitation module, an ascent module. With previous NASA technology, the lunar module cylinders separate axially so that the force vectors are opposite one another. But during the ascent stage the module is going to need to separate laterally—that’s actually something that hasn’t been done yet. I really put a lot of time into researching what’s been looked at and then putting out some concepts that identify areas that need to be studied.”
Kevin lettered in varsity football in 2004 and in 2007. He was one of three graduating Buffs to be inducted into the Hampshire Honor Society in 2008 by the NCAA. A starter placekicker, Kevin will perhaps best be remembered for a fall 2007 game where he kicked a 45-yard field goal in the final two seconds to defeat the Oklahoma Sooners, 27-24.
By graduation, Kevin had already been offered a dream job: working on NASA’s Crew Exploration Vehicle called Orion. Orion will replace the shuttle, as part of the Constellation Program to send human explorers back to the moon, and then onward to Mars and other destinations in the solar system. Its first flights are planned for early in the next decade. Kevin will be in the Systems Engineering department of Lockheed Martin Corp. in Houston at the Johnson Space Center.
“I love CU,” said Kevin. “It was one of the best decisions I ever made to come here. The people and the facilities have just been top notch.”
Rob Witoff
2009 Senior, Aerospace Engineering
Rob Witoff chose aerospace engineering because it’s the most exciting and challenging profession he could imagine.
As a kid, Rob was so bored in school that he found an outlet for his curiosity by tinkering and experimenting on personal projects of his own. Like the time he wired a video feed to his computer using a second home telephone line. It worked just fine until the shocking moment when he learned that a lot of current travels through the line during an incoming phone call.
With a grandfather who flew B17s on bombing missions during WWII and an aircraft enthusiast father who took him to air shows, Rob’s curiosity turned skyward and he became keenly interested in the expanding field of space exploration.
“As cliché as it sounds, I want to be a part of pushing beyond boundaries and establishing new frontiers,” he said. “I want to be where cutting-edge science and technology are happening.”
Rob has had two internships at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU-Boulder. In one, he helped design and implement a flexible algorithm to assess space weather forecasting results based on existing U.S. Air Force validation criteria. In the other, he rewrote the algorithm for the spacecraft solar positioning tool that helps satellites accurately locate solar bodies during scans.
This past summer, Rob worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)--a NASA-funded laboratory established by the California Institute of Technology--on the systems engineering team for Constellation, a new manned spaceflight program. Rob designed an improved approach for collecting data from the organizations that will be participating in the launch of the new craft, scheduled for 2014.
“Why should we go into space? It’s instinctive for mankind to explore,” he said. “We sailed across the Atlantic looking for the new world. Space is the final edge frontier. The sheer excitement of it should make everyone want to be a part of it.”
The capstone of the aerospace engineering undergraduate program is the group senior project. Rob’s project, the Re-deployable Multi-rover System (ReMuS), is to design, construct and test a mother/child multi-rover system for JPL. ReMuS consists of one large rover that transports smaller robotic rovers, which are deployed to explore the surface of a planet or moon. Rob serves as the deputy project manager of the 10-person team on this student project, which may help bring about the next generation of robotic exploration.
“To be part of a much larger project like that is just mind blowing,” he said.
But Rob is interested in more than aerospace engineering. In 2007, he won the CU-Boulder Deming Center for Entrepreneurship Business Plan Contest and took fifth place in the 2008 National Business Plan Competition for his business plan that launched Chalk Talk Communications LLC. He designed a communications system that allows public school teachers to send a message to all of their students or their student’s parents by delivering the message as an email, text message, instant message or phone call.
While getting his system up and running, Rob received legal advice from the CU-Boulder School of Law’s Entrepreneurial Law Clinic and was offered free office space from the Deming Center.
Chalk Talk has garnered some buzz in the tech industry. Rob presented Chalk Talk at an enterprise forum sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and held in Boulder. He has also presented Chalk Talk at numerous local technology forums, one of which was to more than 300 technologists at the Boulder New Tech Meet Up, hosted by the law school. A local school district is testing the system and plans to begin rolling it out to schools in the coming year. Chalk Talk will be featured on a Microsoft web site, and the technology was highlighted in an article Rob wrote for Microsoft’s coding4fun web site.
“I saw there was a problem being able to collaborate and instantly merge ideas with my peers using the existing university site and thought it would be great to build a really cool collaboration site everyone could use,” he said.
When he isn’t putting in 100-hour weeks on his academic, entrepreneurial and research pursuits, Rob spends his free time snowboarding, playing soccer, and mountain biking.
After graduation, Rob has a job waiting for him at JPL, initially to work on assessing and modularizing one of the major satellite simulation tools.
“Half of me is obsessed with entrepreneurial ventures,” he said. “The other half of me would love to make a career at a place like JPL. I would like to find a happy medium, but so far I haven’t had the chance to build manned rockets in my backyard.”