Presenting at the AIAA Student Conference

Author: Benjamin Harp | Majors: Mechanical Engineering, Physics | Semester: Spring 2024

I am currently doing research with Dr. Huang in mechanical engineering. Our lab is designing a miniature satellite that is to be launched into orbit to do atmospheric research. My role is to design and create a sensor system that the satellite will use to determine its position and orientation while in orbit.

I went to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) student conference at Oklahoma State University to present the work that I have done thus far on the sensor system. This is the first conference I have ever attended so I wanted to use this to gain experience writing about and presenting my work. Because this was a student conference, it was a very low stakes way to gain experience. Most of the other students that presented were around my level of knowledge and experience.

Because the nature of the conference was very unspecialized, most people in attendance had little to no experience with technologies like the one that I aim to develop. As a result, I didn’t receive any feedback that could be of much help to my research, but I did get feedback on how to better present my work. The judges all spoke with me after my presentation and gave me their thoughts which I think will be very helpful for the next time I create a presentation.

During the conference got the opportunity to speak with professionals in my field. One of the judges worked in the National Labs and offered to help me and another person in my lab get an internship if we ever wanted. I also got a chance to spend time with people from other schools that share similar interests which I’ve never really gotten a chance to do before. We met a group of students that went to Oklahoma State, and it was interesting to hear their experiences in research and engineering and how they differed from ours.

The two biggest takeaways I had after going to this conference were how to present my work and how to work to present. The first is pretty self-explanatory; I spent a lot of time preparing and practicing my presentation, so I learned more about the process and got some really good feedback from people in my lab that had experience. I also learned a lot by attending other peoples’ presentations. I saw a lot of stuff that I want to incorporate into my own presentations as well as some stuff that I want to try to stay away from. Learning how to work to present is probably my most important takeaway from this conference. Until the conference I’d been working through my project without fully documenting what I’d done or taking care to save the data that I’d collected to use at a later point. There are a lot of things in my project that can be observed by simply looking at the data without processing it and formatting it to be viewed by others. Because of this, when it came time to gather data and information for my presentation, I had to entirely recollect all the data that I’d already collected. In the future, I’ll take care to gather and save all necessary data as I go.

I plan to continue my research and go to more conferences in the future because I believe they are a very valuable experience. Although my research isn’t quite at a high enough level yet, I hope to be able to present my work at a more professional conference at some point in the future.