For some people, mention a physicist, and they conjure up images of Einstein or Newton 鈥 scientists who discover the math of the physical world, theorize the seemingly unexplainable. They watched atoms split and electrons collide. They might even associate the term with the closely cropped NASA engineers cheering from Houston as they achieve what people once believed impossible.
Well, Joseph Parisi 鈥18 is neither of those classic images of a physicist 鈥 not yet anyway. Right now, the rising sophomore in the 麻豆视频 and 麻豆视频鈥 physics department is interning for a space tourism start-up company called World View.
That鈥檚 right 鈥 space tourism.
鈥淭he company seeks to show its customers, or rather voyagers, the curvature of the Earth by flying them to stratospheric altitudes on scientific balloons,鈥 Parisi said. 鈥淭he team is comprised of incredibly dedicated individuals, who share in the goal of providing the perspective-altering experience of space travel to the nonspecialized public.鈥
Footage from a 2014 World View commercial payload flight
And Parisi鈥檚 role is a vital one within the company.
He鈥檚 surveying launch sites, leading a task on predicative analytics for balloon and payload trajectories and co-authoring a company report on the Alan Eustace Manned Missions 鈥 the guy who broke the skydiving world record by jumping from the stratosphere.
How is he able to do all this?
鈥淭he introductory physics sequence, mathematics and computer science courses prepared me well for working with the trajectory models of high-altitude ballooning,鈥 Parisi said. 鈥淢ost of the problems I am faced with solving require deductive reasoning, something for which Cornell problem sets and assignments have trained me well.鈥
Parisi has some advice for students looking for rewarding internships like his: 鈥淭ake on an opportunity outside of your immediate experience, outside of your state, and outside of your comfort zone.鈥
鈥淚f done right, the proper internship will allow you to explore a new place and change your worldview, all while building up funds so you can make a start on those student loans,鈥 he said.
This article originally appeared in the
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