Isaac Bennett's journey to what he hopes will be a career at NASA began when he was a student at Onondaga Community College. He was on the third floor of Ferrante Hall when a flyer on a bulletin board promoting the NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS) program caught his eye. "That got the ball rolling. NCAS was the first step."
He applied to the NCAS program and was accepted. After completing his Engineering Science degree at OCC in May 2024, Bennett spent a week at NASA's Research Center in Langley, Virginia. "It gave me a foot in the door, a first step towards NASA. It was a great experience. I learned a lot there."
In the fall of 2024, Bennett transferred into the Rochester Institute of Technology's (RIT) Mechanical Engineering program. During his first semester, he applied to NASA for an internship as part of RIT's Cooperative Education, or Co-op program. Again, NASA selected him. And from January 27 to May 16, he learned and worked as a Systems Engineering intern at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "I got to see so much of NASA while I was there. I took a lot of tours, visited different labs, and met a lot of people. It was really cool."
Being in Alabama gave Bennett and fellow interns the opportunity to take weekend road trips to other NASA locations across the south. His favorite was a visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where he met fellow interns and astronauts, including Syracuse native Jeanette Epps. He also saw a rocket launch that sent four astronauts to the International Space Station. "My whole experience with NASA was great. I really loved working there."
This summer, Bennett is a Mechanical Engineering intern at Lutron in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He's spending 10 weeks learning and working for the company that specializes in lighting, lighting controls, and window treatments for residential, office, and hospitality settings.
Being a part of RIT's Co-op program means there will be more internships in Bennett's future before he graduates in 2027. He plans to apply for another NASA internship called Pathways. He learned through his conversations with several employees at the Marshall Space Flight Center that they were hired after completing their Pathways internships. "For me, all of this is the culmination of a lot of hard work which started at OCC, doing the NCAS program, and now a NASA internship, which is something I never thought I would do."
