NASA and Cornell 2009-2010 Rewind

Returning to America after an unreal year of traveling every other weekend with Carson was a strange transition. On one hand, spending a year in Turkey was exactly what I had hoped it would be–a chance to see the world from a new perspective, an overdose of travel, and an opportunity to pause and reload for the correct graduate program and my future.

I realize in retrospect that out of everything in Turkey, it is the companionship of a fellow traveler, trust, and the constant support of one Carson Thomas that I miss the most. For those who have had the pleasure of spending a significant amount of time with Carson, they know that his perspective, open mind, and unique ability to enjoy and look forward to the unexpected are qualities that are hard to come by. When the quirky, the crazy, the random, and the unforeseeable have come my way over the past year I often chuckle to myself and then by reflex look for Carson to share a nodding of heads. While our paths have diverged for the moment, I have no doubt that we will once again travel together, until then I hope that we can simultaneously update this blog with our separate experiences.

The first year of grad school was the hardest academic term (by far) that I have had. One of the good things that taking a year to travel did for me is that it gave me the opportunity to reflect on what I wanted to do more of and less of at Cornell compared to my years at Carleton, Bilkent, and South Eugene. One thing that came to mind is that while the political world has always caught my eye, I have never been that involved with my schools and instead chose athletics  as a main focus. While I don’t regret these decisions, many long talks with Carson led me to realize that I was beyond excited to jump into the political world of Cornell and Ithaca. Looking back on 2009-10, much of what I enjoyed involved my commitment to the graduate student assembly, various community outreach opportunities and the student government of my own program — The Cornell Institute for Public Affairs. One funny facet of being so involved in a new location with new faces around is that others perception of who you are, what you are experienced in, and what you want to do is purely based on the first few months of social and professional engagement.

One aspect I often struggled with was the fact that I have always had a very close group of friends that was in one way or another strongly tied to my past…perhaps I was spoiled for a long time…regardless, I struggled for a while with the fact that that link was gone for the most part and would have to be rebuilt. Ithaca may be gorgeous but the setup of the community and campus for a few different reasons is not very conducive to fluid social connections. The above factors, combined with an overly focused academic couple of terms, and it was really not until the end of the spring that I felt truly comfortable with my friends and surroundings.

One year of an amazing program that is CIPA as well as a few fantastic connections made along the way and I am very grateful to find myself in what has thus far been an amazing internship at NASA’s Office of International and Interagency Relations in Washington, DC. In the two weeks that I have been on the job I have been extremely appreciative of the involvement and trust that my supervisor and others in the office have granted me. As part of my final project (similar to a thesis) for CIPA I am working on the Obama administration’s new initiative to use NASA as a means to reach out to nontraditional partners through space policy. It’s proving to be a challenging project but one that has endless avenues to explore and has taken me from Latin American ambassadors to Russian and Swedish atmospheric balloon agreements.  Perhaps my favorite moment thus far was taking a tour of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland where we got to visit the Operations Center  for the Hubble Space Telescope and send real-time messages to Hubble 345 miles above the earth. The time it took for our signal to bounce off of two centers in California, up to Hubble, and back down to us took less than 1 second.

I will be in DC through the beginning of August at which point I’ll have a short time to visit friends and family before heading back for the final year of my two-year program. Let this be a challenge to Carson who often talks of posting on his new adventures but rarely does…