Summer Update: Linguistics Graduate Students at NASA

Lalitha Balachandran (PhD student) and Allison Nguyen (PhD student in Psychology and MA student in Linguistics) spent part of their summers working as interns for NASA. They had the following to report about their experiences:

Lalitha:

“This summer, I worked with a team of STEM faculty, scientists, education specialists, and administrators at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate to initiate a new program aimed at increasing partnerships between Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), PhD-granting institutions, and NASA centers. We organized a community workshop to hear from folks at MSIs and other under-resourced institutions about barriers to participating in research. In addition to planning and preparing for the workshop, I also got to do some NLP analysis of NASA applications/proposals, demographic analysis of the workforce, and mapping of geographical regions (under-)supported by NASA’s research and educational programs. It was a fun mix of projects, and it was great to learn about NASA’s ongoing initiatives to support educational equity. Overall, I found it to be a really rewarding experience!”

Allison: 

“I spent part of my summer (remotely) working for the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity (ODEO) at NASA Stennis Space Center (based in Mississippi). This was my second internship at NASA, and it was very enjoyable. As part of my job, I helped run an event celebrating Women’s Equality Day, collected some data on Stennis diversity initiatives, and gave a talk discussing how to approach incorporating equitable language into the workplace in meaningful, and actionable ways. I participated in Pathways Agency Cross-Center Collaborations (PAXC) and served as PAXC Center Chair for Stennis.”