HUNTSVILLE, AL >> Brianna Dungate wants to study medicine in college. She’s a junior at Saratoga Springs High School where, when she’s not serving as president of the debate club, she’s taking AP Physics or a computer coding class. She’s interested in schools like Harvard, Tufts and Stanford. Recently, however, something else caught Dungate’s attention: a camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL.
The Honeywell Leadership Challenge Academy accepted 320 students from 45 countries and 27 U.S. state and territories as part of two one-week long programs from Feb. 25 through March 10. Applicants had to be students, ages 16-18, whose parents were full-time Honeywell employees.
Dungate, whose father is an engineer at Honeywell, had this out-of-world experience the first week of March.
Dungate had to write a couple of essays and submit an application, and then Honeywell provided the rest.
“Rockets aren’t exactly my forte but the science, technology, engineering and math was definitely aligned with my interests and I thought, ‘oh why not, maybe I’ll get in, it’ll be cool to go,’” said Dungate. “There’s nothing to lose.”
The week consisted of simulated astronaut training and shuttle missions, meeting NASA scientists, engineers and former astronauts and designing, building and testing rockets.
“One of my favorite activities was we had to build this heat shield out of four layers of different metal and basically stick it to a dowel and glue to something, and then you had to put a torch on it for five minutes, and my group was the only group out of two weeks that their dowel [stuck] for all five minutes and didn’t get burned,” said Dungate. “So that was really awesome, too.
Dungate’s group included students from all over the world.
“There was a girl in my group from Romania, a girl from London, a girl from India, a guy from Ireland. It was really awesome to be exposed to it,” said Dungate. “There was a kid in my class from Turkey who knew everything about jets... And this is the plane you’d want to fly, so being exposed to that was really awesome.”
The Academy was developed in partnership with the U.S. Space & Rocket Center (USSRC) that uses interactive technology and science-oriented workshops and team exercises to teach high school students leadership skills in science, technology, engineering and math.
“It was really cool,” said Dungate. “The space station in Huntsville was right across the fence, where the people were actually tracking what’s going on at the international space station, so what we did was mostly simulators, what you’d be actually doing, so we got to go on these missions.”
Dungate said the focus of the academy was team building and leadership.
“What I learned definitely is communication is huge when working in a team, especially because it was people from all different countries,” said Dungate. “...Even though we all had different cultures and different backgrounds, we were still able to work together to achieve these tasks and different people’s aspects of leadership sparked different times.
Since 2010, Honeywell has awarded more than 2,090 scholarships to students to attend space camp.
“I’m really grateful that Honeywell was able to facilitate this because I never would have had the opportunity if they hadn’t offered this scholarship, obviously,” said Dungate. “I’m glad I did it, definitely.”