PEOPLE Class of 2012 Scholars become UW-Madison alumni

In May, the UW-Madison PEOPLE program celebrated the graduation of 36 college scholars; among them the program’s first industrial engineer, a mechanical engineer, students who have studied abroad, and scholars who have consistently volunteered and contributed to the widening array of majors, interests and  leadership roles held by PEOPLE students.   

“Lifting younger students as they climb is one of the tenets of this program,” Dewalt said. “I want to encourage all of you to live a life that matters. Continue to give back and lift as you climb,” adding from a poem by an unknown author that “ready or not someday it (life) will all come to an end.”   

Prof. John Francis uses music to fine tune the audience's focus.

Keynote speaker Dr. John Francis, Visiting Professor with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, who voluntarily walked everywhere he went for 22 years and didn’t speak for 17 years, transported the audience to a place of listening by opening his remarks with a musical selection on the banjo. His message to graduates was life’s greatest lessons are yet to come if they just listen and pay attention to the world around them. 

“People are part of the environment,” Francis said, “so one of the first things we can do to save the environment is to improve how we treat each other.” 

He also told graduates it’s now time for them to explore and decide for themselves what they would do with their educations and how to find the meaning of their individual lives. Francis said his parents questioned what he would do with a bachelor’s degree when he didn’t ride in cars or talk.  He came to Madison and earned his advanced degrees while honoring a vow of silence, showing institutions can change. The graduates’ track record thus far show they’re well prepared to make a difference in the world, Francis added. 

“I’m just really amazed,” he said of the students’ accomplishments. Using the ability to really feel the atmosphere learned during his years of silence allowed him to sense the pride and sense of achievement the PEOPLE students and their families share, Francis said. Their loved ones’ presence at the graduation spoke volumes to their mutual support and commitment to the PEOPLE educational and developmental path.  His parents – especially his father — didn’t always understand his approach of silence and spurning fuel-powered transportation, Francis said, but he always showed up in loving support. 

 And there were times when he also didn’t fully understand what he was personally seeking, Francis admitted. It hadn’t planned to earn a doctorate degree or traverse the United States from coast to coast. He only knew he couldn’t give up or not follow his heart. 

“The only thing I knew was I had to live this passion in my heart,” he said. “This journey is a journey that we all share and this evening is a celebration, but we don’t want you to stop.  We want you to live your dreams. We want you to live your passion.  Don’t stop.  Keep walking, keep loving and supporting each other, and we’re all going to show up at the end.”

PEOPLE Scholar graduates reflected on how their long past with the program led to a successful graduation.

Parent Sharon Billings presents PEOPLE Director Jacqueline Dewalt with a Legislative Proclamation honoring her work.

“I started the people program here in Madison in seventh grade and now that’s like a 10-year anniversary” said Yessenia Garcia. But it occurred to her that inspire of being the “naughty” kid in elementary and middle school and having no idea what she wanted to do with her life, the PEOPLE program invested in her potential.

 “I will forever remember and give back to the program,” said graduate Chang Vang.

 Rachel Garry thanked her mother for supporting her participation in the PEOPLE program and attending UW-Madison. “I know I am the woman I am today because of all the sacrifices she made,” Garry said.

Amid the honors to parents and graduates, All Parents on Deck (APOD) founder and long-time PEOPLE parent Sharon Billings presented PEOPLE Executive Director Jacqueline Dewalt with a special commendation from the State of Wisconsin honoring Dewalt’s dedicated service to the program since 2000.

 PEOPLE Scholar Class of 2012 

Christiana Banks – Sociology BA, Certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies; Miriah Barger -Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies BA, Spanish BA, Global Cultures Certificate, Chican@ Latin@ Studies Certificate; Bettina  Billings – English BA, Legal Studies BA; Jasmine Bounds – Social Welfare BA, Criminal Justice Certificate; Angel Castillo – Finance, Investment and Banking BBA; Kara Coates – Community and Nonprofit Leadership; Ginger Contreras – Anthropology BA, Theatre and Drama BA, Archaeology Certificate, Classical Studies Certificate; Daniel Anand Dharam – Linguistics BA; Brandi Dupree – Gender and Women’s Studies BA, Sociology, BA; Jay Flores – Mechanical Engineering BS; Yessenia Garcia – Spanish BA, Gender and Women’s Studies Certificate; Raechel Garry – Social Work BSW, Criminal Justice Certificate; Gloria Gonzalez – Social Welfare BA; Megan Harmon – English BA, Philosophy BA; Alexandria Harris – Journalism BA; Clintel Hasan – Gender and Women’s Studies BA, Sociology, BA; Tanesha Jones – Elementary Education; Paden LeMieux – English BA; Nilajah Madison-Head – Chinese BA, Linguistics BA; Alysia Mann Carey – Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies BA, Spanish BA, Political Science BA, African Studies Certificate and European Studies Certificate; Jing Mei – ANS Microbiology, East Asian Studies Certificate; Jo’Niece Monk – BA Social Welfare; Franella Ngaboh-Smart – BS Sociology; Aaron Olson – BS Mechanical Engineering; Maia Pearson – Asian Studies BA, International Studies BA; Kourtnei Robinson – BA Psychology; Casey Rogers– BA Political Science; Antonio Sanchez – BA Social Welfare, Chicano/Latino Studies Certificate; Julia Shaw – BS Industrial Engineering; Andrea Stuiber – Comparative Literature BA, Spanish BA, Integrated Liberal Studies Cert, Global Cultures Certificate; Souleevanh Thao – BA Asian Studies, BA Languages and Cultures of Asia Asian American Studies Certificate; Mai Vue Thao – BA Social Welfare, BA Languages and Cultures of Asia, Southeast Asian Studies Certificate; Chang Vang – BS Retailing; Tyra Walker – BA Sociology, Criminal Justice Certificate; Janelle Wesley – ANS Biochemistry; Kesha Wilkinson – Individual Major.

PEOPLE Program’s Aaron Olson interns at NASA 

By Jonathan Gramling 

 Space, the final frontier. Those words have inspired generations to look toward the moon and beyond. For Aaron Olson, space may someday become a reality. Olson, a PEOPLE Scholar, recently graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in mechanical engineering. And while UW-Madison may not be viewed as a portal to space, it was engineers at UW-Madison who helped design the Hubbel telescope, which allowed humankind to take a closer look at the universe. And it is UW-Madison that has allowed Olson to dream of space.

 Shortly after enrolling at the UW-Madison School of Engineering, Olson decided that he wanted to become involved with space-related projects. He applied for a NASA internship his freshman year and was turned down. But that didn’t discourage Olson. He applied again and was accepted for an internship the summer after his sophomore year.

 “I was out at Goddard Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland close to Washington, D.C.,” Olson said.  “The way they treat it at NASA is that once you are in the pipeline, they like to keep you in the pipeline. Over their history of internships, they’ve always had the problem where a student will have an internship at NASA and then they will end up getting the job as a contractor for some company instead o working as a civil servant for NASA. And now it is difficult to get any position at NASA because it is hire by attrition. One guy will go and then a young guy will be able to get in. So even though it is hard to get a position, they like to keep you in the pipeline as long as possible. So when they see you have one internship already on your resume, the next guy likes to see that and you are more attractive to the next guy.”

 During the spring semester of his junior year, Olson was headed to Toulouse, France and studied for six months at an institute called ISAE. But instead of coming back to Madison that fall, he took a coop position at NASA-Langley Research Center in Virginia. He worked on inflatable habitat technology. It proved to be invaluable to Olson when he returned to the UW-Madison campus.

 Olson and 11 other students entered the X-Hab Competition in which NASA invited three schools — the University of Maryland, Oklahoma State and UW-Madison — to design a prototype lunar habitat. They had one semester to design the habitat and one semester to build it.

 “They had universities develop a habitat prototype that NASA could test out in the desert as a type of analogue for something they might want to use on the moon, Mars or potentially an asteroid sometime in the future,” Olson said. “We worked on that for an entire year. A lot of the research that I did at Langley correlated directly with what we were doing, so that really helped. We spent essentially a semester designing the project and another semester actually building it and then in the summer of 2011, we actually took our prototype out to Johnson Space Center and tested it against the other teams’ actual prototypes and fortunately enough, we won the competition. And because of that, our habitat was actually taken out to the desert near Flagstaff, Arizona in the Sonoran Desert. A few students who are a part of the project here got the chance to go out. I was able to go out there for a couple of weeks and missed classes to do it, but it was a good experience. I don’t regret that.  They tested out the habitat; put it through a whole bunch of different scenarios. It worked pretty well. It did exactly what they wanted it to do.”

 The UW team created BXL, short for Bucky X-Loft. It was a two-story structure made of fabric and metal that would have to be viable in the harsh realities of space.

 “Really what is going on in these inflatable habitats is they are multi-layer systems,” Olson said. “You’ll have a layer, which is called a bladder. It is the layer that actually blows up. But then you have to think about you’re in space and there are a lot of threats or environmental issues of being in space that you have to take into account. One of those things, for example, is the radiation environment. You have to find a way to protect your astronauts from radiation that the Earth protects us from on an everyday basis that once you are in Outer Space, you don’t get that protection. So your habitat has to have those types of layers on it to protect from that radiation. Second, you have to protect from micro-meteorites. So there are specialized layers that go around the initial bladder or layer that blows up that protects you. A micro-meteorite travelling as fast as a bullet hits this habitat, you have to make sure it isn’t going to puncture everything and all of the air in your habitat just goes away in a second. They are actually very complicated systems of many different layers of specialized fabrics and specialized materials that come together to make these habitats. And also, you have to attach these things to rigid structures, aluminum or steel. That makes things even more complicated because whenever you attach two different types of materials, there are always issues. It sounds simple and it is an interesting concept to throw around that you would be living in a bubble out in space. But there is actually a lot more to it.”

During his senior year, Olson was involved in two other projects. The first had him back in the desert of the southwest. He had definitely been bitten by the space bug.

 “I was part of something called the Mars Desert Research Station,” Olson said. “Students and faculty from around the country are essentially solicited to submit proposals for research that they might want to do at this station that the Mars Society keeps out in Utah. You propose a list of experiments that you want to do. You go out there for 1-2 weeks and perform the experiments and pretend that you are actually on Mars the entire time. So every time that you go outside, you have to put on this mock space suit and you have to go through this list of procedures to make sure that you aren’t violating the laws of going in and out of a pressurized environment on another body. We did that for a week. My specific project was a 3-D mapping project. I took pictures of the surrounding area of the habitat that we stayed in and turned that into a 3-D model of the area using a program that Autodesk actually has free on the Internet.”

 And then, this past spring, Olson and some student colleagues had a zero gravity experiment accepted, an experiment that got them aboard the “vomit comet,” the airplane that the astronauts used to train for weightlessness 20 seconds at a time as the DC-9 took steep dives and climbs to induce weightlessness..“Through this zero gravity program, students can propose a project that you would potentially use in the International Space Station or anywhere where there is no gravity,” Olson said. “We did a dust cleaning study essentially. It’s been known since the Apollo program that the dust on asteroids or the moon can be very abrasive on space suits. It can be very damaging to any type of system. The dist is very fine and because of the different effects of it being in its environment for so long, it becomes very sharp and electrostatically charged. It is very difficult to get off of anything. And once it gets in the middle of a couple of gears turning against each other, it is very abrasive and it will wear down the gears after a long time. It makes machines not last as long. And it just gets in the way of doing things efficiently. We wanted to do something that is achievable in one semester, so we picked that as the topic and we went ahead and designed a glove box and a couple of cleaning tools to go inside the glove box to test how well we could clean some of these things in zero gravity. Our experiment worked pretty well and we had a great time floating around in microgravity.”

 Olson isn’t done with space yet. He will be taking up engineering physics for his Master’s program at UW-Madison. Then he will see which way the space program is headed. Will it be a public venture, a private venture or a combination of the two?  Whatever way it unfolds, Olson wants to be a part of the space program.

(Posted with the permission of  The Capital City Hues)