Can NASA Fill Their Expertise Gap With Interns?
JSC Internship notice – NASA
Keith’s note: You may recall that NASA has pushed a huge portion of its science and engineering workforce out the door. Now NASA Johnson Center director Vanessa Wyche wants to hire people as Interns (students). Internships are great – but they usually embody a chance to eventually land a permanent job at NASA. Given all the firings, that is not likely. But if you look at the work descriptions it sounds like the things that departed employees used to do albeit more cheaply. Oh yes, there is a typo in her LinkedIn post that says “pursing” which is defined as ‘puckering one’s lips to express disapproval or irritation instead’ of “pursuing”. Just sayin’.
2 responses to “Can NASA Fill Their Expertise Gap With Interns?”
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NASA had Pathways interns performing mission critical work on numerous programs and elected to terminate them over the last six months. In many cases these interns had performed 3 or 4 intern sessions at NASA and turned down numerous better-paying opportunities assuming they’d be hired like 99% of Pathways in the past. Instead we screwed them over, screwed our projects out of cheap already-trained labor, and now have the gall to advertise for more.
Over the years I have had some truly excellent students working with me directly or my coworkers. They did top notch work. That said, often they did not come into the workforce with the skills already in hand to do that work. The larger issue, with nearly 20% of the JSC workforce out the door this year, is the lack of senior engineers to mentor those youngsters. So no, you can’t fill the expertise gap with students who lack the expertise.