A background in music didn’t stop one Emporia native from reaching for the stars.
Christina Harbaugh, a piano teacher at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D., spent the summer in Greenbelt, Maryland as an intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
An Emporia native, Harbaugh graduated from Emporia State University in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in piano performance, and from Wichita State University in 2000 with a degree in piano pedagogy. She has been teaching for eight years in the piano preparatory program.
“Here’s the thing,” Harbaugh said, “I teach beginning class piano at 8 a.m. and then my little kids don’t come in until after 3, so I had my whole schedule open during the day.”
Harbaugh decided to fill her afternoons with classes, she said. “So I took computer science I and they said, ‘Oh, you’re really good at this,’ so I took computer science II and III.” After that, Harbaugh said, she decided to pursue a computer science degree, which she hopes to complete in May.
“I love school and I love learning,” she said.
One of the instructors at Augustana had some background in working for NASA and informed her of the South Dakota space grant, which she applied for last fall and was accepted. She then applied for the Goddard Combined Intern Application and was accepted into the Student Internship Program, or SIP.
According to a press release, SIP is a research-intensive program that “... is designed to allow students to spend their workdays at Goddard Space Flight Center conducting research for various projects and missions.”
Harbaugh was one of more than 900 students to apply for just over 100 spots in the program.
“When they called me back in March I was so happy I almost started crying,” Harbaugh said. “I was really, really happy, jumping up and down. I felt like I’d won the lottery.”
Harbaugh was paired with a mentor, Steven Vaclavik, to guide her in her research.
“I can’t really talk too much about my individual project,” Harbaugh said, but described her work as a mission-readiness database to help various organizations come together to work on a new satellite, to be tentatively launched in 2010.
“It’s to test five new instruments and it’s to prepare for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS),” Harbaugh said. The project is in conjunction with the Department of Defense and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. “My project was to upgrade the mission readiness database for the NPOESS Preparatory Project,” she said.
According to the NOAA Satellite and Information Service Web site, “NPOESS is the next generation of low Earth orbiting satellites. ... The NPOESS will be providing global coverage, monitoring environmental conditions, collecting, disseminating and processing data about the Earth’s weather, atmosphere, oceans, land and near-space environment.” Data gathered by the satellite “... will allow scientists and forecasters to monitor and predict weather patterns with greater speed and accuracy.”
The program at GSFC lasted 10 weeks over the summer, Harbaugh said. “The GSFC interns are quite fortunate because it’s the only internship where they provide you with housing and transportation, so we were lucky there. They housed us at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and bused us back and forth every day.”
She still keeps in touch with the people she met in the program, she said. “One of my roommates was from New York City and one was from Oregon, so we came from all over. I made a lot of friends.”
“It was a wonderful opportunity,” she said. “Right now there aren’t that many women in computer science, so for me it was an excellent opportunity to meet students throughout the country who are interested in the same things I am, and I could talk to them about their projects and classes and how things are going and the future.”
In the meantime, Harbaugh has returned to Sioux Falls, where she continues to teach piano lessons and work toward her degree in computer science.