Summer interns at The Aerospace Corporation during the intern Ice Cream Social trivia contest. Photo: Eric Hamburg

Summer Interns Learn the
ABCs of the Corporation

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. (8/26/05) -- Like most jobseekers, applicants must be intelligent, hardworking, and proactive to obtain a summer internship at The Aerospace Corporation.

This year, the corporation's Human Resources Department received more than 5,000 student resumes, a testament to the increasingly competitive nature of the company's internship program.

As the reputation of The Aerospace Corporation has spread among students, the applicant pool has grown tremendously, according to Walt Caldwell, manager, Staffing Resources. The resumes are reviewed based on a students major, prior experience, and grade point average. Top candidates’ resumes are then dispersed to managers who have expressed in hosting a summer intern.

This year, the result was 160 summer hires in the company's El Segundo headquarters and 12 at the company's office in Chantilly, Va. “Because of the high volume of applicants, we are very selective. Most of our interns are ranked at the top of their university class,” Caldwell said.

Mayra Sheikh is an intern in the Materials Science Department, Space Materials Laboratory, and will begin her senior year studying chemistry at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., this fall. She found Aerospace through a flier left at her school’s career center by her supervisor, Dr. Alan Hopkins, senior member of the The Aerospace Corporation's technical staff.

“Interns bring new ideas and a sense of enthusiasm that help drive research projects into new areas that benefit the overall goals of our projects,” Hopkins said.

Returning intern Richly Chheuy ended up at Aerospace by placing first in the Robert H. Herndon Memorial Science Competition, and annual event at Aerospace that engages highschool and middleschool students throughout the region. Without a technical background—Chheuy is an undeclared sophomore at UC Berkeley—his challenge has been finding a niche within the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies, Systems Engineering Division.

“In the beginning, it was hard to determine what I could accomplish and contribute to my department,” Chheuy said. “But I’ve worked on some interesting tasks and developed a real appreciation for the inner workings at Aerospace.”

To aid interns’ understanding of the corporation, HR presented “Discovering Aerospace,” for the second summer. This set of information sessions introduced interns to the different aspects of the company’s business.

More information about the company's intern program

The Aerospace Corporation, with headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., is an independent, nonprofit company that provides objective technical analyses and assessments for national security space programs and civil and commercial space programs in the national interest.