On the last day of my LARSS internship, NASA EDGE filmed my lab for their Future of Aeronautics episode! It’s currently up on NASA’s main page in the “Podcasts and Vodcasts” section, and it’s available both online and through iTunes. The opening montage has clips of my labmates and I, and the segment about our work starts at 19:18 and lasts three minutes.

I encourage you to take a look!

Wednesday, August 4th. 10AM. The Aeronautics Student Forum.

My lab is lined up in the front row, fidgeting, exchanging nervous glances. We trade seats between the other students’ presentations, taking turns with the laptop to read over the half-done powerpoint.

The motion tracking camera system is set up (we were in the building until 10pm the previous night, testing our hardware and software, ensuring it’d all be ready to demo). One of the cameras lurks beside the white screen, ominous, a constant reminder that it’s our turn in an hour, and like or not, we don’t have our finalized slides and some of us don’t even know for sure whether we’ll be speaking.

It was nerve-wracking.

It was also remarkably exciting.

Presentations, preparation, control

I usually plan presentations out to the last sentence. I know I’m not an improv whiz, so I practice my talk out loud over and over. Any slides I have, they’re done at least two nights ahead of time. Practice, preparation, organization. No need to worry because I have everything under control.

This presentation at the aero forum was the opposite.

The previous week, to the relief of my labmates, I’d tried to organize everything (the slides, the talks, the demo). But our mentor, Garry, told us not to worry about any of it. He kept repeating that: don’t worry. It’s just a presentation.

None of us were convinced.

It wasn’t until Garry sat down with me and explained what he had in mind–how he was going to help compile photos and diagrams into a logical order–that I trusted he was right. No need to worry. He had given scores of presentations. He had good ideas. He frequently pulled things together last-minute. It’d be okay.

In short, when he explained that, I consciously relinquished control. I mentioned control (and the lack thereof) in the context of volleyball games with my lab. The same idea comes into play here: Setting perfectionism aside, trusting that someone else is competent enough to get the job done. Teamwork. All that good stuff.

Coming together last-minute

Garry showed up not long after 10AM, printed copies of the finalized powerpoint in hand. As our time slot approached, my labmates and I shuffled discretely through the slides, still worried, still anxious.

Our turn came. We trooped up to the podium, all nine of us. We spoke. Twenty minutes, all told (not too long, really), plus the demo. We explained our newly established Autonomous Vehicle Lab, its capabilities, and what the audience would see in the demo. We flew our quadcopter. We demonstrated object tracking and obstacle avoidance.

It went well. It went better than well: our presentation was splendid.

Everyone knew what to say. Everyone was clear, concise, and comprehensible. Perhaps it was because we were not prepared that we were prepared: rehearsing, in our minds, coherent sentences about our parts of the project. Recapitulating our work with the quadcopters, the DGPS system, the Vicon cameras, the many vehicles and pieces of software. Unsure of what we would need to say, and thus, preparing for the worst.

If not for Garry’s persistent “don’t worry about it”s, I would never have experienced a presentation this way. I’d have planned out that talk and every one after, never daring take a chance on not preparing enough and not practicing enough. Now I know. Our aero forum talk was proof: Things can come together last-minute.

That said, I think I still like having my slides done more than an hour before the presentation. As engrossing an adventure as it was, last-minute isn’t going to become my style.

The article I wrote about my LARSS internship for the Langley Researcher News is up at An Intern’s Story: A Time to Test Flying Robots.

I encourage you to take a look!

One of the difficult parts of playing a new sport is that I’m not good at it yet.

My lab played volleyball this summer. Every Wednesday after work, we trotted out to the grass behind the conference center, doing our best not to complain about the humidity and heat. We greeted the other two teams in the league (both of which had clearly played volleyball before–not just in gym class in high school, or, in my case, once during a summer program five years ago), we helped set up the nets, and we began bumping a ball around.

Volleyball was not where any of us excelled. Sure, by the end of the ten weeks, everyone in the lab had improved. We could do what might be called a volley. I could be in the right place at the right time to hit the ball, even if the ball then flew off in completely unintentional directions. When I served, the probability that the ball would both get over the net and stay in bounds was greater than chance (if I remembered to stand on the right, that is, because my serves always flew too far left). It was great fun.

It was also frustrating. I knew that given enough practice, I could be a half-decent volleyballer. Instead of the game being a matter of physical skills and pure luck, it could evolve into a complex, strategic battle, with us setting up plays and plotting out how to outwit the other team. But ten weeks isn’t quite long enough to get us to that point. (Sometimes, I’m impatient.) We lost just about every match played against the other teams.

Losing is hard to watch

My lab had split into two teams and recruited a few extra interns, so most days, the five or six of us on my team rotated through four spots on the court. This meant that some games, I stood on the sidelines during the game point.

That was difficult.

I had no direct control over whether we won or lost. I had to stand there, watching, as hands missed the ball, as the ball smacked the dusty grass, or flew too far out of bounds. I had no power over how hard my teammates tried (whether they desired to win enough to dive after the ball; whether they were tired and sweaty and just wanted it to be over). I could be a cheerleader, but I could not actively influence the outcome of the game.

That was new.

My usual sport is fencing: highly individual, always solo. When you’re on the strip, it’s just you. If you mess up, if you lose, you only have yourself to blame. Even in team competitions, you’re just adding up the scores you and your teammates have separately acquired. You don’t realize, unless you’ve been part of a team, how important it is to trust your teammates. And that’s what made volleyball difficult: because none of us were that good, it wasn’t easy to trust my teammates to be there, backing me up, putting in their best effort to win even though the games were casual and couldn’t be taken seriously given our level of experience.

The thing about trust is, most times, it has to be earned.

Trust and control

Fortunately for my lab, playing volleyball is not what we did full-time. When working on our summer project–establishing the Autonomous Vehicle Lab–I learned I could trust my labmates to have my back. We all cared about the outcome; we could trust each other to each do our part. Not being in control of every little detail (and occasionally standing on the sidelines) was okay, because I knew my labmates were trying just as hard as I was to debug their programs and get the quadcopters flying.

I guess the moral of the story is (besides the obvious “teamwork requires trust”), if you ever have the chance to play a new sport, do so. You never know what you’ll learn.

The photographer talked to us at the summer intern poster session last Wednesday. He saw our videos of the quadcopters in flight, rightly decided that these particular aerial vehicles are awesome, and asked us if we would mind a quick photo shoot.

It pays to work with cool robots.

Summer’s end

Yesterday was my last day at NASA Langley.

As always, leaving is bittersweet. Working in Garry’s lab has been fantastic and it’s going to be hard to find a job next summer that tops it. But I’m looking forward to senior year–a good lineup of classes, my thesis, the fencing team.

If I was to pick a favorite part of the summer, it’d be this: seeing my lab transition from complete strangers the first day, awkwardly introducing ourselves over lunch, to operating as a close-knit team. Helping each other carry computers to the freight elevator, debating algorithms for autonomous quadcopter obstacle avoidance, laughing over mugs of tea in the evenings. I’ve watched group formation theories in action (such as Tuckman’s forming-storming-norming-performing theory). It may sound cheesy, but we learned to work with our differences, figured out how to combine our strengths, and the result was amazing. The amount of work we got done this summer setting up the Autonomous Vehicle Lab impressed a lot of people at Langley.

Yes, I’m nostalgic already.

I met a plethora of great people and learned so much. I have more stories to share, of course. You’ll continue hearing about my LARSS summer in the coming weeks.

1. Don’t fall in 2Gs. One of my labmates got to ride the vomit comet because of a science project he worked on, and not falling was one of the recommendations while aboard the plane. The rationale was this: If you fall, you’ll fall too fast. You’ll try to bring your arms up to catch yourself–it usually works, but here, your reflexes will be too slow. Your face will hit the ground and your nose will smash as your arms are still moving up to catch you.
2. Astronauts have to be a certain kind of person. My mentor, Garry D. Qualls, told me about a colleague of his who became an astronaut. Evidently, they take a certain type of person. Gregarious, outgoing. Dedicated. The kind of person who, upon receiving a task, will be content doing that task day in and day out to the very best of his/her ability–astronauts have to practice the tasks they’ll be doing in space for a long time beforehand. The kind of person who can speak reasonably well to large groups and who enjoys meeting all kinds of people, since a huge part of the job is public relations.
3. Always double-check baud rates, port numbers, and IP addresses. Save before recompiling, have a common ground, make sure to use charged batteries, and give your program the right input arguments if it requires them. Installing the referenced libraries usually helps, too.
4. Stick with your federal/government job for at least three years. At the grad seminar, held in June with the goal of providing student interns with information about post-baccalaureate options, one of the speakers commented offhand that if you do become a fed, if you stick with it long enough, you’ll get reinstatement rights. I did a little googling to see what kind of rights those are: Evidently, it means you can reenter the fed workforce without competing for the job with the general public. It doesn’t mean you automatically get a job offer. There are obviously some restrictions, but regardless, good to know! That page also mentions that if you don’t work a government job for three years, you get reinstatement rights for only three years after you leave.
5. Ask about details when investigating grad schools. The grad seminar included a panel of three students (graduate or just finished) who each spoke a bit about how they had gotten to their current place in life. One of the students offered advice on good questions to ask the professors at schools you’re considering: If you’d get to do research, what would the specifics be? Not just the topic, but how much time would be spent sitting in front of a computer? reading papers? attending conferences?

I’ll continue sharing stories about what I’ve learned this summer, so be sure to check back soon!