AAE student Thendral Kamal earns 2023 Brooke Owens Fellowship
| Author: | Alan Cesar |
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While standing at baggage claim in LAX, Thendral Kamal’s luggage continued circling the carousel. She was on the phone, awestruck, receiving the news she’d been working toward for four years. She was starting her winter break at the end of 2022 knowing she would be in the 2023 class of Brooke Owens Fellows — an achievement she’d been eyeing since high school.
“It felt like a teenage dream come true. I had been dreaming of this call since the age of 16, and it felt so unreal to finally receive it,” Thendral says. “It felt like I had just added another piece to the giant jigsaw that is my life plan.”
She first heard about the Brooke Owens Fellowship as a blossoming aerospace enthusiast living in Dubai. It was a pivotal moment for her, a woman of color, who wasn’t sure she could even pursue a career in aerospace. She didn’t see many role models in aerospace that looked like her – and certainly no woman of color had ever stepped foot on the Moon.
But Thendral is goal-driven, not content to just wonder what could be: She began reading about and following the journeys of each Brooke Owens fellow, and decided that earning that fellowship for herself would be a milestone on the way to her ultimate goal: Becoming an astronaut. Neither international travel nor preconceived notions would stand in her way.
She envisioned where the path needed to be, and began cutting the way.
Thendral says that a commitment to aerospace is one of the tenets of the fellowship, so she chased her passion as an emerging engineer throughout high school. By the time she was 16, she earned a sponsorship from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai to conduct a microgravity experiment on a parabolic flight.
“I worked on my passion for aerospace and my presence as a science communicator in order to become worthy of the badge of a Brooke Owens Fellow,” she says. “Working to further the limits of human science and technology, especially in space exploration, has always been a goal of mine and I saw the fellowship as a way for me to ride the shifting tide of the industry.”
Once she entered the first-year engineering program at Purdue, she wasted no time in applying for the Brooke Owens Fellowship. Her application included an essay on the Summer Stay experience, and a video – with animations she drew herself – on the source of her passion for aerospace.
She made it to the semifinalist round of the lengthy process, but didn’t win. Undeterred, Thendral reapplied later that year. The fellowship was just too valuable to give up.
“For international students like myself, opportunities like these are a treasure trove due to ITAR [International Traffic in Arms Regulations] restrictions barring the majority of internship and co-op opportunities available to aerospace engineering students,” she says. “The pool of aerospace industry leaders mentoring this program are vast, and every single one of them is someone I have looked up to at some point in my life.”
The program partners with many aerospace companies, pairing its fellowship recipients with internships that best match their achievements and career goals. Thendral, who already has a co-op this semester with Delta Air Lines, will follow it up with her Brooke Owens opportunity as a space sustainability intern at SES Satellites in Washington, D.C. She will also meet other fellowship recipients at the annual Brookie Summit this summer, and the program will pair her with an executive mentor.
“I expect the mentorship aspect of this fellowship to be my greatest asset in career development as an emerging aerospace engineer. I see this as the first milestone in my vision to become a part of the changing face of the aerospace industry in the US,” Thendral says.
“I am proud to hold the banner of Purdue’s first international Brooke Owens Fellow, but I know that I will not be the last.”