Marlins Gain Valuable Experience in Sought-after Internships

NASA. NATO. DAHLGREN NAVAL BASE. VIRGINIA BEACH ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT.

Thanks to an extensive roster of high-demand internships, VWU students have recently tackled complex and fascinating projects at those workplaces and many others.

As a senior, Shaun Guernsey ’23 completed a NASA internship at its Wallops Flight Facility. An engineering intern with Launch Vehicle Engineering, Guernsey helped develop the launch vehicles for each payload that launched both domestically and internationally, along with performing postflight performance analysis of rocket boosters for each mission flown.

“Overall,” Guernsey said of his NASA experience, “I have a better understanding of the difficult but highly valued job an aerospace engineer plays in our society’s quest to further our scientific knowledge.”

In 2022, Josh Spicer ’24 interned for the Virginia Beach Department of Economic Development, which oversees the zoning and planning for the city.

“The biggest project that I was able to work on,” Spicer said, “was the Spanish scrap metal company that we hosted for a visit, as it was looking to move to Virginia Beach. It was interesting to follow this project from the start and work on it so closely. I was able to better understand what my coworkers do on a daily basis with various companies.”

An internship with the NATO Innovation Hub led Ryleigh Taylor ’24 to gain new skills and connections. Taylor collaborated with professors from around the world and provided them with content important for teaching others to think critically. She also cohosted and moderated the plenary and closing sessions of the NATO Innovation Conference.

“As a political science and international studies double major,” Taylor said, “I am extremely interested in learning more about how different countries work together to create and maintain peaceful relationships with one another. During the internship, I was able to collaborate with many people from different countries and learn about their viewpoints of domestic and international issues.”

Not many students have the opportunity to work on a U.S. military base with some of the brightest scientists in America. But as an intern, VWU student June Richardson ’24 collaborated with a group of physicists at Dahlgren Naval Base on a long unsolved problem regarding gravitational disturbances in Earth’s field.

At the end of the internship, Richardson produced the paper, “On Gravitational Disturbance,” which was published in a controlled Navy research journal. Moreover, hard copies of the paper were distributed within several government buildings on the base.

“I was offered a number of job opportunities from various government agencies,” Richardson said. “All it takes is an internship to come up with an exciting new idea.”