Sharing Experiences with a JPL Intern

By Nathanael Wales

Last summer and this summer our National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute and NASA sponsored an innovative internship program—called Excellence through Challenging Exploration and Leadership (EXCEL)—for incoming and first year college students who are blind. These students interned for several weeks at NASA centers throughout the country and participated in our weeklong National Convention. As readers of the “Journal” know, last summer three students interned at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, this summer one student interned at JPL. And as our NFB of California did last summer, affiliate members and chapters did a number of activities to make this student—Kelly Wills, who will be a freshman at Wright State University in Ohio—feel welcome in California.

Affiliate members’ welcome began on Memorial Day, two days after Kelly arrived from a week of orientation and training at our Jernigan Institute in Baltimore. Kelly traveled to the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westwood, adjacent to UCLA, to spend the afternoon with my girlfriend, Therese McCabe, founding president of our West Los Angeles Chapter, and me. We began with a true California experience, one, in fact, that had been recommended to Kelly: lunch at In-N-Out Burger. After lunch, we traveled by public transit several miles to Santa Monica to the 3rd Street Promenade. After walking around the shops and enjoying a couple of free street performances, we headed a couple of blocks towards the ocean and the Santa Monica Pier. The day was clear, sunny, and warm, so we had the challenge of traveling in the crowds of hundreds of other people visiting the pier. We explored the shops, found the couple of restaurants, and considered the couple of rides.

Of course, Therese and I were interested to learn from Kelly about what he would be doing at JPL during the summer, and Kelly asked us many good questions about southern California, about my job and what to expect working in an office, and what to expect at our NFB National Convention. The afternoon provided us with an opportunity to extend some Federation hospitality, southern California-style, and an opportunity to share and mentor that is a core component of our EXCEL program. I spent some time with Kelly again at our National Convention: his internship is going well, the work he is doing is interesting (and will be onboard a probe sent to Mars in 2009), and he is enjoying southern California.

I look forward to working with Kelly as a fellow officer in our national Science and Engineering Division in the coming years, continuing the networking, sharing, and mentoring so fundamental to the work of the National Federation of the Blind.