Amazing how quickly things change, sometimes. Seven years of grad school in Atlanta seemed endless at times, and I often wondered why the end seemed so far away. Then, suddenly, I was defending and was done! Since then, it's been the complete antithesis of that time, with so many things happening so quickly, it's been hard to keep up! In a good way, of course! I finished my degree and then promptly moved to a new city, started a new job, bought a new house, and so much more. And now it's amazing to think that all that happened a year ago.
I started work on December 2, 2013, and have now been at NASA over a year. I can honestly say that I thoroughly enjoy my job, and that I'm excited about what the future holds. As with any job, the first year is a little slow going. It helped that I had worked at Goddard three summers in a row, so there was a lot less learning and orientation that was required. But the first several months were still adjusting to something new (though a month and a half in Florida helped that a lot! ;-) ). Now, after a year, I finally feel like I'm getting settled, know what I'm working on, and have long term projects I'm involved in.
Perhaps the most exciting one is the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which, if all goes well, will be a multi-year project to build a robotic spacecraft to pluck a large boulder off an asteroid and bring it back! With an expected launch in 4-6 years and a multi-year mission, it'll be quite a project. The past couple months of working on it have been fun, because it's a challenging robotics problem, but right now we're just waiting for NASA to decide how to proceed. Hopefully, we'll hear soon, and there'll be plenty of work to do in the years ahead to get the mission done!
More info: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/initiative/
With all the things that have changed in the past year and a half, it's been a little overwhelming, but definitely exciting, and I look forward to what's yet to come!
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