Group of AAE students participate in Congressional Visits Day
Melanie Grande couldn’t wait to tell fellow AAE students.
After attending Congressional Visits Day last year in Washington D.C., solely because she learned about it while on co-op at NASA Langley Research Center and a couple people from the organization attended, Grande came back to Purdue in the fall on a mission.
“I’d never heard of Purdue students going, but I was like, ‘We can go. Let’s do it,’” Grande says.
So Grande got the word out, holding an initial call-out meeting and, eventually, raising funding for a 2019 trip. She figured she’d be fortunate to have 10 people show interest. There were nearly 40. So Grande expanded her fundraising to AAE’s student organizations. Ultimately, 20 students were selected to make the trip.
So, for the first time, a large group of AAE students attended Congressional Visits Day on March 20 in D.C.
Congressional Visits Day is organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), which has sent members — engineers, scientist, researchers, students, educators, and technology executives — to D.C. every year since 1999 for a day of advocacy and awareness with national decision makers. Students and professionals participate in meetings with each state’s representatives and congressional staffers to discuss issues in the aerospace and defense industry.
The School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, AIAA, and AIAA’s Indiana Section, as well as student organizations AIAA Purdue chapter, AAE SAC, Aero Assist, Purdue SEDS, Sigma Gamma Tau, and Women in Aerospace, sponsored the two-day trip, and much went into making it a successful one.
There were three meetings to prepare before leaving for D.C., and the group of 20 split the into three smaller groups so each could tackle one of the key issues outlined by the AIAA to present in D.C. The issues were funding stability and competitiveness, research and development and innovation, and workforce development and enhancement.
By the first day in D.C., Purdue’s group was ready for a four-hour training session at Lockheed Martin’s Global Vision Center, led by AIAA’s director of public policy and government relations Steve Sidorek.
“You can do some research on your own and read over the materials, but when you’re a professional, you don’t have the group like we did. We had a unique training for this event, and I think we were more prepared than maybe a lot of people there,” says Grande, a first-year master’s student whose emphasis was on workforce development and enhancement. “Especially as (mostly) first-timers, I think the preparation was very important.”
On Day 2, the group headed to Capitol Hill. After the first few meetings, students shook any nerves and found a rhythm to the meetings, which lasted only about 15 or 20 minutes with each staffer.
Purdue’s group attended 71 meetings and spoke to representatives of 12 states. Of the 20 students who attended, 11 spoke to 11 Indiana representatives. Only once did that entire group of 11 speak to a staffer — Senator Todd Young’s office found a larger office to accommodate everyone.
“We had some pretty responsive staff members, so that helped a lot,” first-year master’s student Tracy El Khoury says. “You don’t want to be condescending, but you also want to simplify the terms. You have to try to make it interactive. You can’t just go and talk for 15 minutes straight — they’re going to get bored. You researched in advance that specific representative, what they’ve done in the past, what committees they were on, what topic could be more of interest so you don’t have to talk about all three.”
Grande and El Khoury already were interested in policy before attending D.C., but participating in Congressional Visits Day certainly has given them a new perspective.
“It makes you want to do more because you realize you can make a difference and how much room for improvement there is,” El Khoury says. “It makes you want to try to do something else to do something about it. Really, the point of this was, as aerospace engineer, you can’t just be an engineer and locked in your office and not be aware of the outside world. You have to be aware of what’s happening. You can be a great engineer but with the wrong policy and the wrong timing, you just don’t get anywhere.”
Grande is on the AIAA’s public policy committee, and she says the organization spends the year working on the three key issues and developing papers on smaller issues. So she’s been ingrained in policy for some time, and the Congressional Visits Day has only intensified that passion.
“It just reminds you how important these things are and how important it is to share that view with our senators and our representatives,” she says. “I was also just feeding off the group being there. I was like, ‘Wow, all these people really care.’ You just realize how many people can make a difference. That really energizes me as well. On the other hand, too, when you go there and you start learning more about it and start thinking more about our political system, maybe you do get a little down and frustrated, a little disheartened. But being there to do something about it counteracts that statement.”
The diverse group of 20 students included freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors and graduate students: Paul Belingon, Christina Cooke, Cullen Dahleen, Tracy El Khoury, Melanie Grande, Fouad Khoury, Robert Kitching, Noah Mains, Islam Nazmy, Youssef Noureddine, Jin Suh Park, Kimberly Rink, Yuhan Roh, Morgan Ruesch, Stephen Scheuerle, Jordan Soberg, Vidya Subramanian, Michael Thompson, Jon Webb and Angela Zhang. Tyson McFall, senior academic advisor in AAE, also went on the trip.
In total, about 175 AIAA members representing 36 states attended. They visited about 275 offices to promote the key issues and raise awareness of the long-term value that science, engineering, and technology bring to the nation. Over 60 percent of the participants were students, and Purdue had the largest student delegation.
“As far as the Purdue team is concerned, all the students did an excellent job when interacting with various staff members representing the Indiana congressional delegation,” says Sidorek, who scheduled the meetings and helped lead several of the discussions with Indiana representatives. “At one point during the day I had to take part in a couple separate, unrelated meetings, so the students proceeded to manage two meetings on their own. They did a great job, and it’s all due to their advanced preparations and desire to be vocal advocates for the aerospace sector.”