NASA Florida Space Grant Consortium Student Interns at JPL

MEDIA CONTACT
Dr. Jaydeep Mukherjee – Director

Phone: 407-823-6177
Email: Jaydeep.Mukherjee@ucf.edu

 NASA FLORIDA SPACE GRANT CONSORTIUM STUDENT INTERNS AT JPL

Orlando, Fla – When the NASA Florida Space Grant Consortium (FSGC) tells you that they can send your career to new worlds – they mean it! Just ask Mary McBride, a student at the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) who was awarded an internship from NASA FSGC in 2011. She has another internship this year at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. She will be part of the team that operates the Mars Science Laboratory rover ‘Curiosity’ starting this Fall.

McBride is originally from Hermitage, Pennsylvania. She is currently a senior at FIT where she is majoring in Solar, Earth, and Planetary Science with a minor in Physics. Since she was a little girl she dreamed of walking on the Moon.

For now, her short term goal is to graduate and then to earn her PhD in Planetary Geology – this will have to wait a bit so she can transition away from working on Martian time – and back to normal ‘Earth’ hours.

“I am very grateful to the Florida Space Grant Consortium. They have been a great support system, they have motivated me to continue my dreams and have been very excited about my success,” McBride said. “FSGC has contributed more than money to the past year and a half of my life. It is an organization I am proud to be associated with and I believe the FSGC has helped me get to where I am today.”

About The NASA Florida Space Grant Consortium.

The Florida Space Grant Consortium (FSGC) was formed in 1989, when NASA implemented the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program. The NASA FSGC was one of the sixteen founding Space Grant Consortia. Currently there are Space Grant programs active in all fifty states as well as Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. FSGC is administered through the University of Central Florida and the Florida Space Institute, its main offices are located at the Astronaut Memorial Foundation’s Center for Space Education, found on the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex. The Consortium is a voluntary association of seventeen public and private Florida Universities and colleges.

For more information, please visit: http://www.floridaspacegrant.org