By: Michelle Nguyen. I stand there in the Hawk’s Nest launch viewing area right outside of Vandenberg Space Force Base near Lompoc, CA, watching as NOAA’s JPSS-2 satellite, atop an Atlas V rocket, successfully joins its Joint Polar Satellite System comrades in orbit. While my eyes are trained on the ascending rocket, I can’t help but think “How did I, an invertebrate physiologist by training, end up at a satellite launch?!” 

By: Michaela Margida. If you type the title of this article into a Google search, as I did nearly a year ago when I was first placed in U.S. Senator Cory Booker’s office as a Legislative Knauss Fellow, you’ll find that there are over 27 pages of results. I read the first 30 or so search results before realizing that confidence probably wasn’t something I’d get through an academic approach.

By: Shellby Johnson. When I received an unexpected invitation during my Knauss Fellowship to join an ocean exploration transit across the North Atlantic, stress definitely entered the room, but I chose to fight, and it was one of the best professional and personal experiences of my life. Learn about my experience in this interactive feature.

By: Renee Richardson. The Sea Grant Knauss Fellowship specifically targets students who “... have an interest in ocean, coastal and Great Lakes resources and in the national policy decisions affecting those resources.” Although it is not explicitly stated, meteorology does fall under this statement. The atmosphere and the ocean are linked and, in many cases, cannot be considered independent of one another. But what does this mean exactly? 

By: Lu Wang. To take full advantage of all this year has to offer, I adapted a mindset early on in the fellowship to try to say “yes” to every opportunity. And so when my host office asked me if I wanted to go to sea as part of my fellowship, my response could only be, “Absolutely, I do.”