HMNS dinosaur exhibit

Link to HMNS.

During the summer of 2019, I worked as an intern in the Astronomy department. My daily duties consisted of leading guided tours for museum visitors and summer camp attendees. In addition to this, I conducted surveys and analyzed the results to scaffold future tours and planetarium shows. I was lucky to have interned with the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) in 2019 as it was the 60th anniversary of Apollo. During the anniversary, our department invited the original mission control staff and their families to participate in the interactive moon landing simulation that I was part of setting up and running!

I used Excel to visualize the survey results and OpenSpace to lead the virtual tours of the Moon.

My science fair project “A Slick Model: an Oil Dispersion Model” won a special award at the Houston Science and Engineering Fair. This special award was the opportunity to participate in an internship at HMNS.

My biggest challenge with the internship was the public debate. We, the HMNS interns, were split into two teams: Mars, and Moon. The purpose of the debate was to get the summer camp attendees interested in spacefaring. So, instead of sharing negative points about our opposing team’s satellite we shared positive points about our own. As the debate was hosted in front of a large audience and was live streamed on Facebook, I was nervous about the event. I overcame this by carefully preparing my notes and rehearsing what I planned to say.