The operator.
I build the boxes that have to work the moment power goes on — the avionics, the flight computer, the sensor stack between the bus and the rest of the spacecraft.
I'm a junior aerospace engineering student at the University of Texas at Arlington, on track to graduate in May 2027 with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and minors in Mechanical Engineering and Space Systems Engineering. Before UTA, I earned an Associate of Science in Engineering from South Texas College in 2023.
I came up doing cybersecurity in high school — running a four-team CyberPatriot club through national competitions — which is where I picked up the habit of reading systems carefully, troubleshooting under time pressure, and actually documenting what I changed. When I switched into aerospace, that posture transferred straight into avionics and integration work.
"Aerospace is the field where the hardware has one shot to be right. I want to be the person who made sure it was." — Operating philosophy
What I'm working on now
I'm the Avionics Lead for Project BlueSpear, AIAA at UTA's student space launch vehicle. I run a five-person avionics and command-and-data-handling team, owning subsystem design for the flight computer and sensor stack, interface control documentation, and the hazard / risk picture for integration and test.
On top of that I'm Professional Events Coordinator for AIAA at UTA — a 530+ member organization — where I work with a 20-officer leadership team to bring in industry speakers and run professional-development programming for the chapter.
How I got here
Over the past 18 months I've stacked up the kind of experience that I think actually maps to a real aerospace job: I owned the comms subsystem for a year-long CubeSat feasibility study, fabricated graphene-reinforced polymer composites in UTA's nanoscience materials lab while running my own RF attenuation experiment, designed and flew a Level 1 high-power rocket solo, and built quaternion-based 6-DOF spacecraft models in MATLAB and Simulink for coursework.
I move comfortably between hardware and software — composites in the lab one week, link budgets and trade studies the next, then back to Simulink to bring up a sim. I'm fluent in Spanish, a U.S. citizen (so I'm clean on ITAR / export-control work), and I'm open to relocating for the right opportunity.
What I'm looking for
A Summer 2026 internship on flight hardware — ideally in avionics, GNC, integration & test, or systems engineering on launch vehicles, spacecraft, or in-space systems. Companies I'm most excited about: SpaceX, Firefly Aerospace, Lockheed Martin Space, Intuitive Machines, Blue Origin. If you're hiring on something hard, I want to hear about it.