Location, location, location. This may still ring true for real estate, but location is no longer a barrier for internship opportunities. Virtual internships are the wave of the future – and Hawaii native Bryceton Scurr ’19 is riding that wave as a content hacker and creative writer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
“As a sophomore, a NASA internship is a dream come true,” said Scurr, who majors in the 3-2 engineering program. “This internship gives me course credit and will serve me well for engineering school later on.”
The highly competitive NASA internship is one of many offered by the Virtual Student Foreign Service (VSFS), the largest virtual internship program in the world. The entire internship will be remote and team meetings will be held online.
As a NASA intern, Scurr started working from Whittier this month and will get to apply some of his physics knowledge as well as his creative writing skills. For the next eight months, he will work 5 to 10 hours a week along with seven other undergraduate and graduate students around the country in NASA projects related to employee engagement, innovation, collaboration, and also to reinvent the way employees receive critical onboarding information through a new employee handbook.
One of Scurr’s first assignments was to curate digital content and post it on twitter to disseminate the hashtag #NASAproud. The purpose of this assignment is to promote stories or content that highlights NASA’s people and their work.
Future internship projects for Scurr will include interviewing NASA employee focus groups, researching existing documentation, drafting agency-wide workforce communications, and providing written insight for easy digest. He will also have a chance to present new products to senior leadership at the end of the internship in April 2017.
An avid video game player, Scurr plans to pursue a career in video game design or computer engineering.
