ISPA@GT participated in the Fostering Access & Inclusion ‘Round Tech (FAIR Tech) competition that is hosted by the College of Engineering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council.
Below, we proposed activities to enhance AE-specific career development support for GT International Students in Aerospace (IASs).
FAIR Tech Competition
The College of Engineering’s FAIR Tech competition seeks to inspire students to apply engineering principles to develop innovations that create a fairer and more just community at Tech. The goal of FAIR Tech is to support innovations that promote equitable inclusion and access for all of the Georgia Tech community. Particular emphasis is given to innovations that improve and/or address needs and sense of belonging for marginalized populations.
For more information about the FAIR Tech competition, please view this document.
Proposed Innovation 1: Providing AE Career Development Support
Activity 1: Making a Comprehensive Guide for Navigating the Industry as an IAS
There is so much confusion around the aerospace industry’s export control issue and immigration in general that 1) many IASs are unable to make an informed decision about attending a US university to study aerospace in the first place, and 2) once they arrive, they waste a lot of time trying to understand the landscape. The best way to mitigate this is efficient knowledge transfer from seasoned IAS alumni, in the form of a comprehensive guidebook. Our team has the knowledge necessary to write up this guidebook, which will be similar in style to the GT graduate student handbook, and contain the following:
- Information about the current US export control/immigration situation and how it affects IASs
- A discussion on long term career prospects in the US aerospace industry, focusing on what opportunities are available based on aerospace discipline and student nationality
- Advice on “how to make it” as an IAS, including networking and job searching strategies
- A regularly updated list of aerospace companies that actually do hire IAS
We intend to have the AE department distribute this guidebook to all new IASs arriving at GT as part of a “welcome package”. This will help students make the best decisions for their futures early on. We will also provide the guidebook as recommended reading for the GT career center and AE academic advisors, so as to enhance their understanding of these challenges and enable them to offer more informed guidance to students.
Activity 2: Creating New Opportunities Through More Targeted GT Corporate Outreach
Recognizing the limited job opportunities available to IASs, our second activity aims to increase visibility and access to international-friendly aerospace job openings. This will involve helping GT AE corporate outreach programs target the right companies by leveraging IAS alumni knowledge and the list of international friendly companies in our guidebook. We will work with the team who puts together the job section of the “AErial View” weekly newsletter, to add jobs listed by international friendly companies in a specially demarcated section of the newsletter. Similarly, we will also work with the organizers of the AE-specific career fair (Sigma Gamma Tau), to increase the number of international friendly companies in attendance and clearly demark their hiring policies to students.
Another corporate outreach program organized by GT AE is the Mentors in Residence (MiR) program. Currently, 4 out of the ~30 mentors are listed as being able to provide advice regarding “opportunities for non-US citizens”, and none of them work in the space sector. We propose to add our team’s leader, Antoine Paletta, since he has successfully navigated the US space industry as an IAS (worked at multiple satellite companies in the US) and is very familiar with the process. We would like to add a second mentor, ideally also from the space sector, but we have not identified a candidate yet. Our team has previously worked with the MiR program’s lead, Lydia Pendleton, and would be happy to continue this collaboration.
Activity 3: Leveraging FNA@GT to Create an International Aerospace Community
We believe that another important aspect of empowering IASs is to create a community at GT where they can get together and share ideas, helping to make this movement self-sustaining. In furtherance of this goal, we created a registered student organization a couple months ago, called the Foreign Nationals in Aerospace @ GT (FNA@GT). So far, we have 10 members, who have been focused on putting together this FAIR Tech proposal and getting feedback on it from various GT stakeholders. During the Spring 2024 semester, we would like to get a larger chunk of the student body involved. We are currently planning a couple events: a “happy hour” where IASs from across the department can meet each other and bond over their shared experiences, and an IASs tailored resume workshop. To maximize participation and impact, we have discussed and received approval from faculty to promote FNA@GT through the “intro” classes (AE 1601/8002) at the beginning of the semester.
Evaluating the Impact of our Proposed Activities
To measure the success of these initiatives, we propose conducting surveys. A first survey, to be conducted on all GT AE students at the beginning of the Spring 2024 semester, will ask general career outlook questions to assess how IASs feel about their futures compared to their US person peers. This survey could be conducted once a semester and used by the GT AE administration to help determine how effective IAS inclusion efforts are in the long term. Through these surveys, we would like to identify any job or internship placements resulting from our efforts, and obtain feedback to improve our proposed activities.
Proposed Innovation 2: Removing Barriers to Participation in AE Research
Unlike MIT and Stanford, which extensively apply the “Fundamental Research Exclusion” under their Openness in Research Policy to avoid export control restrictions on university research, GT has a long history of engaging in government/defense sponsored research, which doesn’t allow for such exclusions. This allows GT to pursue a larger variety of research grants, but results in almost all research projects involving “sensitive technologies” being export controlled. Some examples of this include all the CubeSat research at the Space Systems Design Lab (SSDL), most electric thrusters at the High Power Electric Propulsion Lab (HPEPL), etc. Currently, qualified international students are automatically excluded from participating in these projects, missing opportunities to work on significant, cutting-edge research. To our knowledge, the first IAS at GT to overcome some of these barriers was Antoine Paletta, who worked with Dr. Glenn Lightsey and the GT Legal department to obtain an ITAR license to participate in the VISORS CubeSat project unrestricted. The VISORS experience greatly benefitted his career development, and also helped advance the mission, as he contributed to a significant portion of the conops design and flight software.
Our second innovation involves reducing these barriers to IAS participation in export controlled research projects at GT by creating a GT Deemed Export Licensing Program (DELP). This program will help make the export licensing process more common and accessible across the AE department, so that more students can go through it in order to work on cutting edge research. Recent conversations with GT AE faculty and leadership (including Karen Feigh, Mitchell Walker, Tim Lieuwen, Glenn Lightsey, Brian Gunter, Adam Steinberg, and Joseph Oefelein) have shown strong support for such a program, expressing the benefits it could bring to research labs in terms of talent density and diversity.
The GT DELP will be guided by a comprehensive document we are drafting. It will outline the program’s objectives, explain the export licensing process, and detail the responsibilities of each stakeholder in the process, ensuring clarity and effectiveness in the program’s implementation.