But “Aerospace Engineering” was the last thing that the secretary at the Penn State Visual Arts Building expected to hear when she asked what my major was. My mom and I had toured the campus that day and she wanted to show me a plaque on the wall: one with both of my parents’ names on it. You see, both of them are PSU art major alumni; my mom was in photography and my dad worked with printmaking, graphic design, and the fine arts. We talked to the secretary for a bit, discussing the plaque and how I was actually heading for aerospace engineering; no wonder she was surprised!

Growing up surrounded by art had trained my eye to view the world differently. I observe the world and notice patterns, symmetry, and even lines. The finer details show through in everyday life, as I notice the subtle nuances of colors, shapes, and lighting. This wiring in my brain is also one of the integral reasons why mathematics comes naturally to me. The flow of calculations and the way numbers fit together have always fascinated me.

But the universe is not often built on neat geometries and satisfied equations. I often found myself fussing about little things from drawing straight lines to worrying about one Lego part missing when I had thousands. I would get stuck on one small step and couldn’t move past it. If I couldn’t learn a certain concept in my math worksheet right away, I would quit out of frustration. I had turned into a step-to-step perfectionist, drowning in detail after detail. But as I grew older, I learned how to find order in the chaos, through yet another art technique: looking at the big picture.

Have you ever seen one of those huge paintings that look like random, messy brushstrokes up close? Georges Seurat, a famous painter from the late 1800s, made quite a few pieces like this. It isn’t until you step back and look at the painting at a distance that the true picture comes into view. As I slowly grew older, not only did the skill of taking a step back help me move around problems and adopt a more fluid thinking process, but it also landed me my first speaking gig: NASA HQ.  

When I was 14, I was selected to be a part of my middle school’s Leadership Team. Through a partnership with the Breaking the Odds Foundation, NASA did a special event that year that challenged teams of students to make a presentation about leadership in school. This specific year, they also asked teams to come up with ideas for a heat shield for the Orion spacecraft.

When we were first briefed on the event, the gears started moving and I took charge. This was a big project, but I had a bird’s eye view. I could see how all of the parts of the project needed to fit together and I quickly found myself leading the team. As the lead, I also got to take to the mic and spoke in Washington D.C. to NASA personnel about our design. This was a monumental influence on my life. It was a test of my big picture thinking, an ability I was working on my whole childhood, but it also jumped-started my now-biggest passion: space and astronautics.

It all fell into place from there. I got into Penn State for Aerospace Engineering and got to work on applying my big picture thinking. I got involved in the Student Space Programs Laboratory designing system architecture for lunar ice excavation and spacesuit debris-mitigation technology which led to writing Preliminary and Critical Design Reviews. I received mission development training from NASA employees through the L’SPACE Academy and was the Project Manager of my project team.

My skills are now being applied in both the space defense industry and in research. I am developing Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) templates using SysML for SAIC, who will push my work up for classified employees to build upon. I am also researching, for my undergraduate honors thesis, novel system architectures for a solar power satellite system that can execute spacecraft-to-spacecraft power transfer.

But I am not stopping there. There are two more artistic traits that I inherited: creativity and imagination.

When I was a kid, my parents bought me a huge bin of Legos from a yard sale. It was literally a box of endless possibilities. And my collection only grew from there. I would spend hours upon hours building cars, spaceships, storylines, and characters. I still do, to this day. My ability to come up with infinite realities for my Legos to live in has now transformed into something even greater. My imaginative and creative mind, combined with my big picture thinking and passion for space, have resulted in a trait that has motivated me to forever push myself to succeed: vision.

My vision of the future, summed up, is that humanity is meant to expand out into our solar system and evolve into a space-faring civilization. I believe that we need to utilize space to make Earth a better place. I have this goal in mind every day; through every exam, through every task at my internship, and through every late-night research session, I remember what it is all for. But perhaps the most prominent reminder appears to me almost every night in the summer.

When I was born, my parents bought me a star from the International Star Registry. If you look towards the Hercules constellation, you can see it near the right arm. The star, now known for all time as “Quintin Colby Nelson”, stands as a monument to my identity. A remembrance of my mission.

And who knows. Maybe one day I will be able to visit the solar system that Quintin Colby Nelson is the center of.