Exploring Engineering Ep. 02: Aerospace Engineering

Evan Smart
It’s a funny saying that we all have, especially when we’re struggling with homework, it’s not rocket science as it is rocket science, but it’s not as hard as people think.

Laura Vogt
You just heard from Evan Smart, a UC Berkeley Engineering student who was interviewed by me for our new podcast series Exploring Engineering. You’ll hear more from him in a moment. Hi, I’m Laura Vogt, Director of Student Communications for UC Berkeley Engineering’s marketing and communications team. I’m also the host and producer of this podcast, Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley.

This episode is an introduction to aerospace engineering, a major that was added to UC Berkeley in the fall of 2022. Aerospace is an exciting way to turn your interest in airplanes, rockets, or space into a fulfilling career. You’ll also hear about resources to help you learn more about the major and get insights into research from a faculty member. Now, here’s Evan and how he knew that aerospace was the major for him.

Evan Smart
My name is Evan Smart. I’m a junior majoring in aerospace engineering. I came from San Diego, California. I grew up in a place where a lot of people didn’t exactly go to college, or never really had college on their radar. And then I came here, and everyone already knows what they want to major in, all these internship opportunities.

I came in, no resume, no LinkedIn, I really had to build it from the ground up. It’s definitely a place where I have a lot of opportunity to do so, and I get a lot of help in doing so.

My COVID year in high school, which was sophomore year into junior year, I realized, okay, I have to decide pretty soon what I want to do in college, to kind of take certain classes for that. I got into Formula One’s Drive to Survive series on Netflix. And I really got interested in, like, all the engineering behind the cars and everything. I was like, Oh, that’s really interesting.
So when it came to college decisions, I knew I wanted to do some engineering, like I knew I didn’t want to really do industrial or civil. I had flown a ton of times in my life, and I just really enjoyed planes. I really enjoyed the movie Top Gun and Interstellar stuff like that, just the basics. So that’s how I really decided to get into aerospace. And then I just kind of fell in love with it through all my coursework.

I think the biggest thing for me is I didn’t realize how multifaceted aerospace engineering was gonna be. I originally assumed like I was gonna be doing fluids and building rockets, like from day one, so much more than that, especially in today’s day and age. I’m having to do coding classes, I’m having to take electrical engineering classes, I’m having to take mechanical classes. And I didn’t realize how multifaceted and how much information from each sector of engineering I’m gonna get.

You get so passionate about it when you start learning about it. I mean, you just saw SpaceX land the booster on the metal chopsticks. Like, that’s an incredible feat of engineering to witness. You see things like the International Space Station. You’re like, wow. Like, wow. Like, I’m learning about that, you know, I’m taking orbital mechanics, and I’m learning about how they got it up there. Just really, like, falling in love with the major has been a great experience.

I originally only saw aerospace as, there’s satellites, there’s rockets and there’s airplanes. Like, that was the big three that I saw. It’s like, you go into one of those. And then coming into my freshman year, and especially now in my sophomore, junior years, when people start to get internships people are like, oh, I want to do guidance, navigation and controls, or, oh, I want to do more manufacturing. I have a friend that wants to do more product management. He’s picked up a data science minor. There’s so much more to aerospace engineering, especially because it’s such a broad field.

Obviously, people say mechanical engineering, you can apply to anything, but aerospace engineering also carries a lot. You can go into vehicle design. You can do aerodynamics for a car, or you can go make satellites, or you can launch rockets. And there’s just so many different opportunities that I was not aware of going into it.

Laura Vogt
You can’t discuss aerospace engineering at UC Berkeley without including Panos Papadopoulos, the director of the aerospace engineering program. His passion for aerospace is evident in how he has created a community among the aerospace students and serves as a mentor for them. This is an excerpt from our conversation that touched on many topics, which included coursework, internships, and research. But I’ve narrowed down the focus for this episode to what you can expect to learn in aerospace engineering and what career opportunities it can create.

Panos Papadopoulos
I’m Professor Panos Papadopoulos. I have been teaching in the Department of Mechanical Engineering since 1992 and I’m also the director of the College of Engineering’s aerospace programs.

Well, for the last a little more than 20 years, I’ve been doing some consulting work for various aerospace related entities, both governmental and commercial. And in that period, I came to realize that we are entering a period of rapid growth in the aerospace industry, and I was involved in some such projects, but then I could see through that involvement how much more was going on and how much more was going to happen in the near future. And I thought, since I’ve got that experience and I see this coming, I should try to bring this to the Berkeley campus. And of course, the College of Engineering is the natural place to do this work.

It’s your classic interdisciplinary sector. It involves knowledge and technology in different disciplines, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, material science, nuclear engineering in some dimensions, bioengineering when it comes to space habitation and civil engineering in terms of the infrastructure needed for some of the technologies to be deployed.
So I think focusing on aerospace as an interesting activity and amateur activity, student run activity in high school level is, I think, a great way to figure out if this is something for you.

I always like to tell people that aerospace technology development is happening in the private world, in the government world, and in the academic world. And I like to say that in the academy, we are really good at looking at 30 year problems, longer horizon problems. We’re not as nimble as a startup will be, actually, and we’re not as well resourced as maybe a government entity will be, to study sort of shorter range problems, but we’re really good at thinking big and creating infrastructure, technological infrastructure, for long term problems.

So I think, frankly, the most exciting long term problem, engineering problem, is how humanity will be able to reach out to space. Whether it is in the form of space exploration, sort of use this large, vast space around us, outside the atmosphere, in order to better understand what happens on the surface of the earth, and then also the extent to which we can consider, seriously, the prospects of inhabiting other planets.

So these are the big visions, which are, you know, at some level, maybe 10 years ago, 20 years ago, they were sort of figments of people’s imagination. But as we get to develop technologies, we’re starting to think of them as real. And I think engineering and the university, actually, the large research university, has a pretty pivotal role to play in this sector.

Laura Vogt
Transfer student Maxwell Stolarz gives us some insight into how he decided to study aerospace engineering.

Maxwell Stolarz
Hi everyone, my name is Maxwell Stolarz. I’m a new aerospace engineering major here at Berkeley. I’m a transfer student from Los Angeles Pierce College, which is a community college in the West LA area, and that means I’m at junior level here.

So how I chose aerospace, it was sort of an evolution throughout my middle and high school life. I knew I always was into electronics and circuitry and these sorts of things. Ever since, like, I was five, I was playing with these little snap circuit toys. I think they’re still out there on Amazon. You can get them.

Going up into high school, I became more interested in robotics or a mechanical engineering approach, and so you can see how it’s sort of morphing the different prospective majors I had. And I think it was really over the pandemic, seeing all of the space exploration breakthroughs of 2021—Perseverance, Ingenuity, all of NASA’s work on that mission, all of the private sector evolution.

So space really has been like a new renaissance, I would claim. And that’s what pulled me fully into the aerospace arena. It’s an interesting, all-encompassing engineering field where you can kind of use a lot of the electrical, mechanical, even civil structural concepts, but apply them to one very cutting edge application. And so even if I choose to work in other engineering fields, aerospace is sort of a major that has it all for me.

Laura Vogt
Aerospace engineering, as I mentioned at the top, is a new program only in its third year. However, I had the opportunity to hear from a mechanical engineering PhD alum whose undergraduate degree was in aerospace, and she was able to study aerospace themes during her time as a PhD student. Here are some of Kristyn’s thoughts on the major, what an aerospace degree means, and how you can learn more.

Kristyn Kadala
My name is Kristyn Kadala, and I went to Berkeley for graduate school in the mechanical engineering department. So my undergraduate degree was in aerospace engineering at MIT, and I moved out to California to do a mechanical engineering degree for Masters and PhD in 2014 and I graduated December 2019.

I really liked airplane design, and so Berkeley does have a lot of old school wind tunnels in the mechanical engineering department. They’ve got some really cool fluid labs. And when I got here, that was my expectation.

I started talking to some of the different professors, and I ended up talking to one professor who had a project that was to improve air conditioning systems, which is a very open-ended question. It was funded by a university in Singapore. And what is relevant there is that Singapore is 95% humidity, 95 degrees almost year round. So they need air conditioning to work well. And I thought, Oh, cool. This is a wind tunnel fluids problem. It’s going to be exactly like the aerospace and once we got on the ground, it was like, Oh, well, thinking about it from a realistic standpoint, our company is going to start redesigning all their air conditioning systems with my new, awesome airflow design, probably not. So, how do we turn this into something practical?

Where I landed on that solution was, well, can we modify the surface or the coating of the material in some way so that it repels water more readily, because you have water that will condense on your air conditioner. Anyone that’s used the air conditioner has the drip tray they’ve got to toss out because so much water will condense on it. And so it ended up being a materials problem. So then I did a deep dive into the world of nanofab and nanomanufacturing, which I never thought I was going to do.

I spent those few years doing that. I learned a ton. I’m stubborn, so I stuck it out, and I realized that I did not want to work in a nanofab lab. I had to ask myself, well, how do I get back to aerospace? I know that’s something I love, without losing what I’ve learned, and what I ended up doing when I was looking for jobs is saying, okay, I’ve done materials, I like planes. Can we do something where those two combine? And I ended up finding, when I was looking for jobs, an R&D job in aerospace, looking at how to develop advanced materials for aerospace applications.

So when I say, oh, well, I ended up doing nanofab and mechanical engineering for grad school and aerospace for undergrad. And now I do aerospace materials, it sounds really obvious. It was a very non-obvious trajectory to get there, but it let me learn a lot of different things with an open mind and then still understand that my core interest is aerospace engineering, but really anything can be brought into aerospace engineering.

So, if you go in with an aero degree, you’re good, but if you go in with a degree in something else, odds are, you’re also good.

Laura Vogt
That’s pretty amazing, how many pivots that you had to do in there.

Kristyn Kadala
I think one thing, especially for undergrads and incoming students to learn, is that people pivot. Like you will need to pivot and you just need to be resilient to doing that and kind of understand that things happen. There were a lot of really good opportunities at Berkeley, I took advantage of as many of them as I could. Definitely learned a lot while I was there, and so I have definitely been able to apply a lot of that to the aerospace industry since then.

Laura Vogt
Did you have or do you have now, even as an aerospace engineer, people that have misconceptions about what that means?

Kristyn Kadala
Oh, I think plenty of people do. I went to one of the Space Center events at Berkeley. And I think a lot of people will assume that aerospace, it can mean aircraft, so think Boeing and planes. People think Elon Musk, so SpaceX, and then people think missiles. And I think those are kind of the three obvious areas that people reach toward.

But a lot of the technology that we use on a daily basis was developed because the aerospace industry developed it first.

So a good example is GPS, which was originally developed for the military, and then industry started using it and commercialized it, and now we use GPS for everything. Basically, obviously, we use it for directions. But the one really fun fact there is that GPS is a key part of our banking system, so every transaction is verified based on GPS. So if GPS went down, all of our credit card transactions would go down.

In addition to that, aerospace engineering could also mean Mars Rover. Could also mean the James Webb Space Telescope, and a lot of the astrophysics research. So it’s more than just a kind of military and defense, which I think is some of the misconceptions.

And so for anyone that’s interested in aerospace, there’s a lot of work being done on the commercial side. It’s grown a tremendous amount. And there’s a lot of science that’s being done too, as well.

Laura Vogt
If someone is trying to find out more about aerospace or explore more into it, and they’re in high school, would you have any suggestions for things that they could do?

Kristyn Kadala
I think it’s horrible to say. I think there are certain opportunities if you live in certain places. So I know living in the Bay Area, you’ve got the NASA Ames site, there are a lot of different air museums. I think if you’re really interested in aerospace, try to engage with them.

There are a couple of different YouTube channels that I think are really helpful for learning different aspects. One of my favorites is called Smarter Every Day, and he touches on just general mechanical things, but a lot of aero as well. And I find those really interesting and fun to just kind of learn general engineering knowledge.

For high school students, I know they’re starting to have more clubs that are available, such as FIRST Robotics. My high school never had that, and I’ve seen people who have done FIRST Robotics excel exceptionally once they get to college, because you start to learn a lot of the typical skills that you would learn in an engineering program. So that would be applicable to mechanical or to aerospace, in general.

But I think seeing if any of those opportunities exist, and more of them are starting to, would be my recommendation.

Laura Vogt
Do you have any final thoughts about being an aerospace engineering major?

Kristyn Kadala
Aerospace engineering is a really broad term, and so one thing that’s really exciting is you can do a lot of things with it. You can be guidance, navigation and control. So all the control systems, the avionics, the calculations, you can be in RF, so all of the antenna and communications, you can be in aircraft design. You can be in satellite design. You can be a systems engineer, because essentially it’s a system.

So there are a lot of options and I’m missing a ton. You could be a structural engineer. There are a ton of different subsets. So going into aerospace, while it feels like it’s limiting, it’s really not. There’s a lot that is part of aerospace, and it’s exciting, because you get to understand this entire system and everything that goes into it.

Laura Vogt
I know this episode of Exploring Engineering is just scratching the surface. My hope is that it has given you a great start in your research into aerospace engineering.

Please check out our podcast webpage, engineering.berkeley.edu/exploringengineering, for more information, including links and animated videos from the Girls in Engineering summer program.

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