Work Shadowing Ideas

Where do you live? The aerospace industry is centered around certain key cities. In the US, Seattle and Los Angeles come to mind, but of course there are others. Of course, besides the big airframe manufacturers like Boeing and Northrup-Grumman, the are about a million smaller companies providing support and components.

"Aerospace Engineer" is kind of a generic term; I've worked in aerospace for over 30 years, and I've never known anyone who had a degree in aerospace engineering . Everyone I work with has a specific engineering degree-- Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical, or Computer Engineering, Physics, etc.. I have a nephew who has his BS in Systems Engineering, and a MS in Astronautical Engineering. I used to work with another guy whose BS was in Mechanical Engineering, but also had a law degree, so he specialized in contract negotiation with our suppliers. I know another guy who has a BSME, and an MBA-- obviously, he's management material.

A lot of people in aerospace (like me) have nothing to do with aviation, but only work on vehicles to travel outside earth's atmosphere.

So think in very broad terms about what are your interests and talents, but in specific terms about what you'd like to do. You want to build airplanes? You want to build rockets? You want to build instruments that fly in airplanes or cameras for interplanetary spacecraft? What would you REALLY like to do?

With that in mind, you may be able to find someone who does that to shadow.

Ed

I live in the New York area. I already know someone whose father works for Lockheed-Martin, but he does managerial work.
I am not really sure what I would do because I think that I should see how the rest of chemistry and physics goes. I am right now pretty flexible in what I would do because I am still very young. I will keep looking into whether I should do rockets and satellites, or airplanes. I have an interest in both. The person I know who works for Lockheed-Martin works at a building that builds satellites, so I should probably talk to him about that.

Thanks

Well, Lockheed-Martin is in many, many different businesses, from building rockets to running prisons. They run the Desktop Computing/Network Support at the place I work. I think that they have just bought up a lot of smaller companies over the years.

Good luck.

Ed