Editor's note: This is the first in series of stories about Bellisario College students completing summer internships.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Sometimes dreams need just a little support, and one recent Penn State graduate found all the opportunities necessary to take a step toward her career dream while she was at the University.
Now, Lauren Colvin is about to take one small step, in the form of an internship, that could produce one giant, long-term career leap.
Colvin, a Schreyer Honors Scholar, earned her bachelor’s degree in advertising and public relations from the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications earlier this month.
She’ll begin her role as a NASA journalism, multimedia and social media intern on May 28. She was one of 15 people from across the nation selected for the highly competitive, 10-week program, and she’ll be based at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Colvin will work as part of a team of writers and multimedia producers from NASA’s Live Shot program and newsroom to share information about science missions, upcoming launches and more to give the public an immersive scientific experience.
“I’m honored and beyond excited to have earned this prestigious internship,” Colvin said, explaining that she fell in love with science and started envisioning a role with NASA after visiting the Kennedy Space Center when she was 8 years old. “NASA, for me, is curiosity embodied. It’s all about the science and helping improve people’s lives. I want to get the next generation excited about science in the same way I was. It's what motivated me to never stop learning and I think that can be a powerful tool for future students."
As she moved from high school into college, though, Colvin found an additional passion for communications — and she moved into science communications, which often involves taking complex scientific ideas and breaking the down into an accessible, easy-to-understand format.
Knowing she'd need experience to be a competitive applicant, she sought out opportunities at Penn State. Colvin reached out to the College of Engineering to inquire about an internship and ended up creating a position for herself. She worked for five semesters as an editorial intern with the engineering college.
"My Bellisario College classes and professors provided me with the confidence to create the opportunity," Colvin said. "What I learned on the job paralleled what we were covering in my classes, which made everything more enriching and fun. I'm thankful for my time helping to tell the story of science and engineering at Penn State."
Not surprisingly, Colvin’s honors thesis focused on science communication. With “Stellar communication: A qualitative content analysis of space science communication on Instagram," she investigated space science communication and social media to better understand how communicators can reach their target audiences.
“I wanted to explore who space science communicators were, what they were talking about and how they were doing it,” she said. “Those three questions morphed into my final research question: How are space science communicators branding themselves on Instagram?”
To answer her question, she analyzed 300 Instagram posts from 30 space science communicators. She found that communicators used credentials, keywords and visual ties to build their brand through their profiles. Then, through their post behavior, communicators maintained and further expanded their brand using activism, consistency and thought leadership.
The project was a fitting combination of her passions, she said — the culmination of her preparation for an opportunity at NASA.