NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS)
Opportunity of a Lifetime

Saint Paul College graduate Amethyst O’Connell had the experience of a lifetime this February. She was one of only 171 college students from across the U.S. to participate in the NASA’s Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS) onsite experience. She credits the superb instruction and mentorship of her Science, Technology, Engineering and Math teachers – Chelsea Tiffany, Pam Schumacher, Zubah Kpanaku and Brooke Timp – as being instrumental in her acceptance into the NCAS online and onsite program. O’Connell also stressed that due to the great instruction in writing from her Composition 2 instructor, Bill Lund, she was able to write her well-received and required paper on designing a Mars rover.

“My favorite part of the experience is that we got to tour the Sonny Carter Training Facility, so we got to see the huge pool that they put the model of the space station in to train future astronauts,” says O’Connell. “It's a pool that's like three stories deep at least, and they've got a huge crane that rolls across the ceiling to lower things in and out of the pool.” A STEM student with her newly earned Associate of Arts and Engineering Broad Field Associate of Science degrees, O’Connell will be attending the University of Minnesota this fall to pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, eventually working in the field of robotics