Students Making History

When something groundbreaking happens, we immerse ourselves in the experience whether its in our own field or one we simply follow. There is so much at our fingertips with the internet, communication, and travel, making information and experience all more accessible than ever before. We marvel at the individuals who accomplish these things and wonder how they did them. We iconize them and separate them from peers and the general populace. But we rarely catch them before their accomplishments have brought them to center stage.

Those who make scientific, engineering, innovation, social construct... breakthroughs, who conceive of and predict future visions of what the universe might be like in the near and very far future, winners of Nobel prizes, and others were youth before they achieved these feats. So what made it possible for them to get there?

Today I introduce one of these youth that may be a household name or recognized in her field someday. In fact, she has already been recognized for numerous accomplishments. As a Senior in high school, class of 2022, Kara Gaiser has already attracted attention of leaders in the aerospace industry with her self made lab experiment “Development of Optimum Design Parameters for an Algae Based Martian Oxygen Production System”, which won her best in show at her local science fair and 3rd place out of 57 international participants at International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), in her category, Energy: Sustainable Materials and Design. In addition, she has already succeeded in online biochemistry class from Harvard EdX program, completed Washington Aerospace Scholars program at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, with Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) she helped design a camera mount which will launch with SpaceX on OreSat0, Oregon's first satellite, and this spring, her high school rocketry club from Oregon Episcopal School (OES) competed against 615 other teams, in the TARC national competition, and came in first!

But how did she get here, and how can other youth prepare themselves for their own accomplishments?

CHALLENGES CAN BUILD CHARACTER

With all her accomplishments to date, it is important to reflect that it didn't necessarily have to go this route. Like other teens, Kara had choices to make and some difficult circumstances, but it was her drive and curiosity (as well as support from family and others) and the challenges themselves that helped pave this path to an early success.

Kara Gaiser shared with me details of some of the challenges she faced. She wasn't just another teenager in middle school. She faced a health challenge that could have not only disrupted her schooling, but caused her to lose confidence and drive, during a pivotal education and developmental stage in her life. She was in 8th grade, a time when social interaction becomes critical to development, when she learned she would have to have reconstructive surgery on her feet, leaving her in a cast for weeks for each foot, separating from her friends and school. Many youth would spend that time reading, playing video games, and chatting with friends, but Kara took this time to challenge herself and learn. These lessons included important life lessons, as well as the science and engineering she was about to immerse herself in.

Her physical challenges were exacerbated by an early, and difficult, lesson in friendship. She began her high school years in a cast, unable to do many of the things her friends were doing. We all eventually learn that real friends stick with you, but not everyone learns at a young age, and often the peers we choose bring us down and even send our paths way off course, sometimes seeming irreversible. After some disappointing discoveries, Kara shared in our interview that she made the difficult decisions to let some friendships go, and to choose her friends more carefully, but reflected that even leaving unhealthy friendships behind was hard. Her choice showed maturity and independence that would become paramount to her later success.

This difficult decision and her new found interest in science became paving stones on her pathway to success.

STEAM energizes molecules even more than STEM!

Another element of her growth was learning that her divergent interests could be complimentary. Kara wasn't always a hard core science student, her first love was art and photography. But after entering the science fair the first time, with “Mock Martian Atmosphere and Its Effect on Algae” where she won a NASA Earth System Science award, she learned that she could combine her visual communication with science and engineering. This also aided her as she joined the rocketry club and contributed to part design and marketing. Her innate talents were complimentary to her new interests, and differentiated her from peers with a singular focus. Learning that her personal creative interests could be complimentary was energizing.

Kara learned even more about how careers in aerospace could harness multidisciplinary skills when she helped to lead the first Youth Aerospace Career Day with fellow PSAS college students, Nicole Henderson and Catie Spivey, who together formed WIA (We In Aerospace) a student group that embraces and centers on inclusivity and diversity. Kara, Nic, and Catie organized and moderated this first of its kind virtual conference, with the guidance of the Viking Mars Missions Education & Preservation Project. This experience was an exercise in project management and professional communications skill building for the team, and they all excelled and fine tuned their skills.

CONTINUITY AND PERSEVERENCE

With all successes that we see, there are many failures that we don't, and if we give up at the first sign of difficulty or our first attempt that doesn't come out how we desire, then we never get to the rewards of hard work and accomplishment. There are as many things working against students as there are for them, these days. With the pandemic, many parents out of work, friends distant and struggling to stay positive, we are all faced with the structures that help to keep us on task being disrupted even as we try harder to maintain a sense of normalcy. This can make our sense of security diminish, while our support structures fail or falter when we most need them. Talking to Kara about her experience during her personal challenges and the pandemic, school, friends, etc... it became clear that the independence she gained during her health challenges helped to prepare her for studying remotely as well as coping with the isolation the pandemic has created for all of us. But it still wasn't easy.

During our interview, Kara reflected on the question about what made her success possible. With the many layers of that success, she came back to the simple act of starting early with the research, which she determined was very important to her science fair success. When she ordered parts that she discovered didn't work, she had time to order new parts, or when a problem had an unexpected outcome, the extra time she had created, gave her the extra days to solve those problems.

Access to the tools and experts to do the in depth research Kara was doing, was also more difficult during the pandemic. Her answer: build a lab in the backyard workshop! Why not, after all many other great companies and artists began their endeavors in the garage, basement, or home workshops. But building a lab created a few more challenges. At school she had access to autoclaves, beakers, and teachers, whereas at home she would have to construct her own lab and rely on limited scheduled input from others. Ultimately, her fathers workshop was taken over by a myriad of equipment that she had to first determine she needed, before she could even begin her science research. She had to do instrument and infrastructure design based on the premise she wanted to test. She had to change the pressure of the environment she was growing algae in, so she needed a vacuum chamber. She needed to build a microcontroller for the data collection process, and to purchase and arrange test tubes and beakers into a test environment... She had to be part project Manager, part Scientist, and part Engineer.?

The family workshop was transformed, with a big chamber in the middle and electrical computing and testing equipment all over the place. She got parts from Amazon including the gas chamber and? by asking and submitting a proposal, her school provided a grant to support the work. So simply asking the questions - of her school, parents - researching, and following it up with a plan, she was able to lay the groundwork for success.

Although she had to be a Scientist, Engineer, and Project Manager, these were not all innate skills and she had to do tasks she did not enjoy as much, to get to the part she loved. Thinking back on the different elements, she shared that although she likes planning projects (despite paperwork and forms), the “hands on and late nights of working in my makeshift lab... with electronics and algae cultures, was my “happy place".?

The time apart from school and peers during healing and the pandemic, according to Kara, also gave her the ability to focus on this singular project. Being a "perfectionist", (in her own words), can make projects difficult to finish to her own high standards, but the limitations on distracting activities actually became one of the keys to her success by providing uninterrupted time to focus and apply creativity, which often needs its own time to percolate. Something many youth don't have these days with over programmed time.

When we asked her about failure, and what it meant to her, she shared that it was really challenging, because she was “a perfectionist”... She felt in her freshman year she had a misconception of failure. When things didn't go as planned it was really hard at first. But after having multiple experiences with unexpected results, she began to take them as learning experiences instead of taking it personally. It helped her stay motivated, learning that mistakes and 'failure' were good. One example she shared was when she was constructing her temperature controls. She was going to use dry ice which would be more easily controlled than normal ice, but had to use “normal” ice because there was a shortage of dry ice due to the pandemic. After at first “freaking out about it”, she continued nonetheless, and it ended up working out. And her new friends helped navigate the frustration by listening, even though they were not knowledgeable about the topics. They helped her to motivate and provided new insights from their own divergent interests, another vote for creating a team of supporting individuals when working on difficult tasks.??

As a three time competitor in the Science Fair beginning in 9th grade, winning wasn't always a guarantee either. So learning how to persevere, when personal objectives weren't achieved, or when challenges came up in her research, and even daily stress of living and going to school during a pandemic, became part of the path to success which she fully realized when she was one of only five finalists to advance straight to International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) representing the USA, and ultimately winning 3rd Place International Grand Award in “Energy: Sustainable Materials and Design”. And as she shared, each year held different challenges.?

In April 2020 the competition went virtual, like activities around the world, when COVID hit and shut down classrooms. But this didn't deter Kara or the competition leaders, who moved it to an online forum. It was intimidating at first, she shared, but exciting as she spoke with well known Biologists and also had the opportunity to hear other competitors' projects. As she rose through the levels of the competition, the questions became increasingly complex and demanding, requiring competitors to understand not only their own immediate areas of research, but implications and dependencies and hypotheses in professional fields that were related. One important lesson she learned early on was from a note on her freshman project encouraging her to learn the applications of her experiment to the broader environment. The "how" and "why" of real world implementation would become another critical factor, pushing her thinking beyond that of high school science fair to real applied studies that might well be relevant to industry itself.

What inspired this subject matter!?

Kara, like many youth, has always loved space, so when she was thinking about her first Science Fair, trying to decide what to do, she chose a problem she was curious about in a field she was passionate about. Her personal interest in terraforming helped her come up with the problem she wanted to solve which was producing oxygen using a process that was more sustainable than electrolysis, while also using resources from Mars rather than those from earth - a better way for Martian colonies to survive.

Her first stage of this investigation was determining how the viability of algae is changed based on CO2 concentration. Since Mars has plenty of CO2, it might be possible to use algae as the producer of O2 because of its effectiveness on earth. Kara informed us that algae and cyanobacteria produces more than three quarters of the oxygen on earth, and is productive because of concentrations of the RuBisCo protein involved in photosynthesis. So for her second year, Kara tried different species of algae and examined the levels of O2 produced by different varieties to determine the best one.

The final year's competition continued her journey towards this end goal of sustainable life on Mars, as she studied optimal design parameters for an algae based Martian O2 production system. Here again her engineering processes became critical again, as well as test design and data analysis. She set about identifying the constants, dependencies, and variables, as well as the optimal parameters for atmospheric pressure, temperature, and other parameters needed to produce the most oxygen.

If that sounds like a lot, it is. What began as a question driven by genuine curiosity in a young mind, evolved through passion and inquiry to a full blown science investigation. A seed was planted as she learned about space, heard about missions, and dreamed about Mars habitation. That tells us that the more opportunities we provide, access to knowledge, even concepts that may feel impossible, the more seeds we plant to help tease the brilliance from young minds, the more we unlock potential.

Is Kara special? Absolutely! Can we give other youth an inkling of how to grow to their fullest potential with the support and resources Kara had absolutely! And in 20 years (or less) Kara Gaiser will be a name recognized even more broadly, and she will be on her way to doing more great discoveries, and youth who read her story can be inspired to work towards their goals, as no one begins life as Nobel Prize winner, discoverer of cures, innovators and inventors... it is hard work, curiosity, perseverance, and support that make these people succeed.

So what is next for Kara?

Her team at Oregon Episcopal School of Portland, Oregon took home the top prize at the world’s largest student rocketry competition – The American Rocketry Challenge – earning the title of 2021 National Champion. She has just been accepted to present her work at the AIAA Conference in San Diego in 2022, to and with a panel of industry professionals no less, and she will be finishing her Senior year and preparing for college.?

Visiting colleges and institutes of interest is a great step for students to take to determine the best fit. As Kara's Mentor, it was my great pleasure to see her hard work and our introductions to industry experts, culminate in a trip to CA to visit schools and meet people face to face.

So how can other youth pave the way to their dreams?

It takes perseverance and hard work to achieve one's goals. But what really drives us to success can be learned and practiced by anyone - passion, planning, taking some risks, and a team.

As Advisor and Mentor for various youth, and as a parent, I take a personal interest in providing tools for youth to design and pursue their life paths. Not everyone has the same opportunities, but often, reaching out to people around you can jumpstart that process and get you closer to opportunities. It takes bravery to ask for help, but the one thing all successful people have in common is that they didn't do it alone. Even those that don't talk about mentors and supporters, if they reflect hard enough, are likely to find that someone removed a barrier, offered a hand, a word of advice, or more. So the first step for anyone is to build your team!

The sky is not the limit! For Kara or other youth.?

Interviews and article by Rachel Tillman, Founder/Director, The Viking Mars Missions Education & Preservation Project, https://vikingpreservationproject.org

https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/the-viking-mars-mission/RQKiJsUJbOktIw