SOAR: STUDENT COLLABORATION ON THE NASA VERITAS MISSION

Increasing the size and diversity of the STEM workforce has been a national concern for decades and remains one of NASA’s goals for STEM engagement. The VERITAS mission SOAR (Student Opportunities in Academics and Research) program directly addresses NASA’s STEM goals and is informed by recent data on where underrepresented individuals matriculate. SOAR offers hands-on opportunities for community college students, recognizing that these institutions are typical entry points into STEM for first-generation, low-income, racial-ethnic minority, and nontraditional-age college students. VERITAS has partnered with Pasadena City College (PCC), an Hispanic-serving institution, for the SOAR program.

This summer marks the inaugural year for the SOAR program, which consists of two components: (1) an 8-week summer paid internship and (2) academic class presentations. For the first component, we are hosting 8 PCC students at several institutions across the country, including The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, The University of Alaska Fairbanks, California Institute of Technology, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Students will travel for these in-person internships, with projects ranging from applying machine learning techniques to synthetic aperture radar images to creating a video to introduce the VERITAS science team. The program includes an Orientation, bi-weekly group meetings, weekly mentor meetings, and a Research Symposium at the end of the summer.

This fall or winter we will begin the second component of the SOAR internship program by hosting a PCC faculty retreat focused on Venus science and the VERITAS mission. The retreat aims to engage 6-10 PCC faculty members with the VERITAS team to help them develop curriculum materials that cover topics relevant to the VERITAS mission. The goal will be to help develop course materials in faculty retreats occurring in the first two years of the program. These course materials would then be used repeatedly over the course of the SOAR program. VERITAS team members from both the science and engineering teams will then visit these classes (either in-person or via video conference) during their VERITAS-focused modules each semester. Such visits from scientists and engineers have been successful in other applications at PCC and has been identified by the PCC administration as being highly beneficial to their students.