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The Academy Experience
The Academy has given me confidence in myself and my direction.
Constantly being surrounded by such great intelligence and ingenuity can't help but affect you and raise your expectations and motivation.
Personally, NASA Academy has shown me, more than any other experience in my life, the value of initiative. I did learn a lot about the space program, but that is only data and data becomes obsolete with time. Out speakers were 40 success stories all joined by their passion for their dreams and their devotion to making them reality. You only get to see a few of those in a lifetime. We had a lot and I now understand and share their visions, but it is time to forge my own vision. Academy showed me a lot of ways of being assertive and of achieving. Life, after all, is what you make of it.
My research on radar applications with Paul [Lowman] was one of the real technical foundations for the remote sensing work which I am doing now on land value assessments in urban areas using satellite imagery.
My wife Anna changed her major to Aerospace Engineering and won a Graduate Student Researchers Program fellowship as a direct result of my participation in the NASA Academy.
The NASA Academy experience has had a profound impact on my career and my life. It is fundamentally responsible for my choice to change from Mechanical Engineering to Aerospace Engineering and influenced my choice of the University of Colorado. The Academy not only made me decide to change my academic focus, it also gave me some very powerful tools to be successful in my chosen field.