I went on my first interview this past week and it ended with me in an airplane. Meeting with Mrs. Van Dellen really helped answer a lot of questions I had about the aerospace industry itself. I learned the educational differences between aeronautical and astronautical engineering, and turns out that engineering, especially aerospace engineering, tends to be the same fundamentals. This means that I can gain a lot of valuable engineering insight from flight test and design aeronautical engineers, since after all I am a student just trying to gain experience.
I plan on broadening my current geographical area to get a sit down interview with astronautical engineers, but if that doesn’t work, I will probably try to get a phone interview with some. Mrs. Van Dellen has contacts in SpaceX (my dream company) so if I decide to do a phone/skype interview, I will look into him.
I also plan on strengthening my skills by learning coding. I can take classes at Collin to just learn to code and become proficient in a language of my choosing. This will really help push my forward towards success in the aerospace field.
In this next upcoming week, I will be focusing my energy towards getting another interview. This time with a professional in a major aviation firm in the DFW area. I also really want to talk to both a test and design engineer, since those are the two major types of engineers found in the field. This would allow me to cover my basis and see what my skills set fall better under, and could even inspire my original work.