Summer Internship with KMI
Emma Arbelius, Bookkeeping Intern
4 minute read
During the summer of 2024, KMI was able to welcome our first high school intern. While made possible through support from the MI-Works Work-Based Learning program, the real deciding factor for offering the opportunity of working at an aerospace company to a high school student was the outstanding background, passion, and creativity of Emma. I had the privilege of both interviewing her as well as being her mentor for the summer, and only faced the challenge of laying out enough productive tasks for her to complete as she quickly exceeded expectations for what a high school student could accomplish in a summer. The following paragraphs are her story of her time at KMI. - Adam Kall, Director of Science.
My entire life, as far back as I can remember, I’ve been in love with space. As I got older, that love evolved into researching rockets and rovers and eventually culminated in a plan to become an aerospace engineer. It was a dream coincidence that I was able to intern at Kall Morris Inc (KMI), especially while still in high school. Before I met KMI at a career fair my sophomore year, I had never really thought about space debris and what happens to satellites after their lifetime is up. When I found out they were taking on summer interns, I knew immediately I wanted to apply and started learning more about them. I’m naturally good at accounting due to my love of math, so my internship started as primarily bookkeeping and accounting duties. Throughout the summer though, this evolved into working in many different areas within the company and learning more than I ever thought I could in one summer.
In the bookkeeping realm, I was primarily working with spreadsheets and doing smaller, more meticulous tasks. I spent a lot of time learning how to manipulate formulas for exactly what I needed to happen. This experience of doing things manually and finding the formulas to automatically create what I needed led to my introduction to Python! I was slowly discovering how much of accounting could be automated and started to learn Python to do exactly that. In addition to these initial accounting tasks, I also had many side quests that ranged from keeping stock of frozen burritos to 3D modeling. Just about anywhere that people wanted extra help, I was there to provide. Many of these tasks were small things, but often having someone else to help makes things happen much faster.
My favorite thing that I got to work on was the hypothetical future KMI Space Station. I researched nearly everything I could find on both the current International Space Station and the abundance of future space stations currently in production. With this information and a basic understanding of the function of KMI’s station, I then set out to create! Using Blender, I made each module a reasonable size to be launched with currently available rockets and made sure to have space for necessary human needs on the station, such as a life support system. I also took into consideration how docking would work and where that would be easiest. Through both this project and another, I was able to see a new side of 3D modeling that I’ve never worked with before.
Having new opportunities means having to learn new things, especially when I primarily learn through core high school classes. Everybody at KMI was incredibly helpful whenever I encountered a new program or concept that I’d never seen before. In addition to learning through doing, I was often able to watch how things worked and get the explanation behind why they work and how they were created. This goes for payroll automation, coding the ISS payload, radar testing, and bits of electrical engineering. Listening to passionate people talk about their work and getting to learn through them is a peak memory from this summer.
Participating in the incredible opportunity that this internship was is a dream come true. I would have never thought I would be able to work with anything space-related until after college and surely never believed it would happen in my hometown. Working with KMI over the summer was an unforgettable experience and I will never be able to express how grateful I am. Thank you to everybody at KMI for giving me the summer of a lifetime and helping me learn new things every day!
- Emma Arbelius <3
Recommended column to read next: Being an Intern at KMI