 My name is Agathya Thiru and I'm a first-year engineering student here at Purdue University. The product I work for is the Resilient Extraterrestrial Habitat Institute. It's also known as Rethi and it's a NASA-funded research project. Our main goal is to develop modular end effectors that will allow tool changers to be swapped out so that the robot can perform a variety of repair tasks in extraterrestrial territories. The project that I'm working on is a part that allows for seamless air flow so that there's no air pressure loss and then it was connected to the rest of the robot to allow for a gripper to pneumatically operate. It's definitely a lot of work but I would highly recommend it to anybody because doing research is so much like an internship opportunity but at the comfort of your own campus and you get to showcase your talent, your want for learning and that shows great things to companies and it's a great opportunity for anybody. There's a lot of work going on especially because of the other extracurricular activities that I'm involved in. It's very time consuming but I deal with my time management skills and prioritizing tasks can definitely help me get through my classes and also work on this research project. So Aggie has been great, he's been very enthusiastic since he started on the project and he has been working on trying to make a more polished version of one of our parts. It may sound like a simple idea but it has a lot involved in trying to do that so he needed to get up to speed on the CAD programs and then get trained on how to use the machine and all the safety procedures are there. Students ask me, you know, how do I get involved or how do I find undergraduate research opportunities as a way to say first, read your email, check out the websites and course blogs. We have an undergraduate blog in mechanical engineering where faculty will post announcements so they're looking for research opportunities for undergraduates. The College of Engineering also has office undergraduate research, also has lots of opportunities listed there or just email faculty members who are doing some research interested and say, hey, do you have an opening? Many times we'll have openings, you can volunteer in the lab or you can even take it for a class credit. So just don't be afraid, just reach out if you see you're interested in something. It was definitely a lot of going through the website of my CCO, going through emails to find listings that are a good fit for me and also capitalize on my talents and strengths. I've always had a dream of being an astronaut because of my interest in space and space exploration, astrophysics, things like that. It really tied in with my engineering interests and how I just like to bring ideas to life so that that integration of interests really helped me decide early on what I want to do and then I just kept finding opportunities to develop those experiences and skills that would be necessary for those career paths in the future. This project has really showed me that that's actually what I want to do in the future. It showed me what I like to do and what I don't like to do, it showed me that this is what I want to keep doing. In the future, 10 years down the line, I want to work on the mechanical aspects of spacecraft and rovers. I want to work for NASA or SpaceX and do design, prototyping, fabrication, manufacturing, assembly, all that sort of stuff. And my ultimate goal is to become an astronaut and go from there.