Heather Bradshaw, Student Ambassador |
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Year: Junior
My dream is to design spacecraft to explore the universe. During high school, I looked at several colleges very thoroughly, and I decided that the University of Maryland is the best place to achieve my dreams. I have had amazing experiences so far and have been presented with terrific opportunities. I am involved in a great program called Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams (QUEST), and I am also involved in four engineering organizations: Engineers Without Borders (EWB), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and Women in Engineering (WIE). Through EWB last semester, I helped design a water sanitation system for village homes in Brazil, and this past January some of our team members actually went to Brazil and built it! Through SWE and WIE, I enjoy participating in outreach events and doing fun activities with high school and middle school students. I also enjoy speaking Spanish, and I am involved in an organization called “En Camino Con La Comunidad”, where I help tutor Latino children near campus. In addition, I love sports and played intramural soccer last year. I also enjoy playing piano, and I sing in the Harmony’s Cross Choir. When I have the time, I enjoy going ballroom dancing and last year I was a member of a really fun organization called Ballroom at Maryland. My dream is to one day work at NASA, and this semester I am very excited to be doing undergraduate research for course credit in the Space Systems Lab on campus. I am helping to redesign parts of the Maryland Advanced Research/Simulation (MARS) suit to enhance maneuverability. The suit is used for EVA research, and we test it in the renowned Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility, one of only three in the country, and the only one on a college campus! The enormous tank is about three stories deep and 50 feet in diameter, and is an excellent facility for simulating microgravity environments in order to test space technology.
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