I worked at KUOG virtually for 20 hours a week between mid-May 2021 through mid-August 2021. While the term internship earned its name through my work, the position was also in part a mentorship between Paul and me.

Given that the main focus was to strengthen my engineering and customer relationship mindset, I virtually ‘sat in’ on many customer relations. A huge part of the company is its supply chain services. When a company or government organization needs a part for something, for an engineering project or for maintenance, there is a lot at play. They would need to find the part, find a supplier, get a price quote, and factor the location of the part with the timeframe that the part is needed in. This is a lot of hearty work, so what companies will do is that they will hire KUOG to do this for them.

At the beginning of my experience, I mostly looked over the variety of orders that came in via email forwarding. KUOG personnel explained to me how the system works. Eventually, I had a hand in finding the parts and getting quotes.

In addition, self-learning was a stressed skill that I needed to learn. Since I only worked part-time, and since a lot of the time people were busy, I had to find things to do on my own time. It wasn’t easy at first, especially since I was in a virtual environment in an industry I wasn’t super familiar with. Eventually, I got the hang of it. I talked to employees and got feedback on what they did during the day-to-day tasks. I also discussed with Paul the big picture tasks that KUOG deals with. With this, I gathered a picture of all the skills and materials that are necessary to learn to be successful at the company. From there, I set off to learn them, or at least become acquainted with them.

An example of material that I looked at on my own was FAR and DFARS regulations. FAR, or Federal Acquisition Regulations, is the primary regulation used by all executive agencies in their acquisition of supplies and services. DFARS, on the other hand, is the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, which is a part of the FAR that is administered by the Department of Defense.

KUOG also assists with NASA Request for Information (RFI) documents. NASA will release questions for vendors and companies to answer that relate to business matters. Some examples include a focus on Commercialization Focused Technology Companies, Entrepreneurs, Commercial Crew Space Transportation, Mission Equity, and Service Provider Capabilities. When these came in, I usually read over the questions and what KUOG’s input was. Occasionally, when I had valuable insight, I offered input from my own opinions and experiences.

In addition, I looked over NASA and other aerospace agencies’ projections for the upcoming year. These organizations know what kind of services they will require for the upcoming quarter or year, so they will compile those requests into one document and release it. These forecasts help NASA understand how to best reach out to buyers, and it also helps companies, such as KUOG, understand where they can help.