APPLICATIONS OPEN NOW!
Now accepting applications to join our Class of 2026.
The Patti Grace Smith Fellowship is designed to celebrate and serve Black Excellence in Aerospace, specifically talented Black undergraduates who have not yet begun their careers in aerospace. We’ve created a comprehensive program that can help any hardworking and talented student, and which has proven to be successful in serving students from historically underserved communities, especially Black and African-American undergraduate students who want to follow the trail blazed by our namesake, Ms. Patti Grace Smith.
Whether you are interested in aviation or in space; in engineering, science, business, policy, or journalism: we hope you will apply. Filling out this application is the first step you’ll take towards an incredible job, a living wage, a cash grant, a new community of inspiring Black peers and allies, and a life-changing experience.
If you want to discuss your application or seek some guidance, our fantastic alumni have created a Patti Grace Smith Fellowship Applicant Discord. Click here to join! Also, be sure to check out the free How-To Guides our alumni created to help you create an application that truly shows off your talents, potential, and interests.
Our application window typically opens in early September. Our application tends to remain fairly similar (though not identical) from year to year, so if you want to get an early start on your application for the Class of 2026, please feel free to read through the form below!
Step 1:
Check Your Eligibility
This one is easy. To be eligible to become a Patti Grace Smith Fellow, all of these things should be true about you:
You should be a current student in a Bachelors Degree program or in any year of an Associates Degree program.
You should be a US Citizen, US Permanent Resident, US National, a Refugee in the United States under 8 U.S.C. § 1157 or an Asylee in the United States under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, and legally permitted to work in the United States.
You should not yet be part of the aerospace workforce. Typically, this means that you should be seeking your first paid internship in aerospace, although there may be some exceptions (e.g. military service, or prior experience in aerospace in a job role or discipline totally unrelated to your preferred future path) that you should seek to address in one of your essays.
You should be of strong moral character and dedicated to furthering the mission of our program and our community.
If you meet those four requirements, you are eligible!
Step 2:
Gather These Materials
Okay, this is the simple and straightforward part. It’s probably similar to what you needed to do back when you applied for college. You’ve got to gather together a few straightforward things.
An up-to-date, one-page résumé. We know you are applying for your first job in aerospace, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have any relevant experience! So please, show us what you’ve got. Make sure you are listing everything that might make you a valuable teammate at an aerospace company – which very likely includes your clubs, side-hustles, and other projects in addition to your coursework and any past jobs or internships. Yes, jobs well outside of the aerospace industry can still be relevant here: they show that you know how to manage a schedule, how to work with others, and more. Before you finish, double check it for typos, then have a friend read it, then have a different friend triple check it just for good measure. (And don’t forget to check out our free How To Develop Your Résumé guide!
To make sure your résumé stays associated with your application, we ask you to submit the file in PDF format and to give the file a certain name that follows this format: 2026PGSF_Lastname_Firstname_Resume.pdf. If we had a hypothetical candidate named, for example, Cindi Mayweather, she would name her file: 2026PGSF_Mayweather_Cindi_Resume.pdf
Your latest school transcript. If you are in your first semester at your new college or university, get us the last transcript you have from your previous school (whether that was your high school or a previous college or university).
One side note: we think it is downright crazy that most universities charge their own students money to access official transcripts. Accordingly, we will happily accept unofficial transcripts. Admittedly, it is possible that if you advance to the final stage of our selection process, our Employers may require an official transcript… but even that is exceedingly rare.
Like with your résumé, we ask you to follow a pattern when naming the file for your transcript: 2026PGSF_Lastname_Firstname_Transcript.pdf. Our hypothetical candidate would therefore name her file: 2026PGSF_Mayweather_Cindi_Transcript.pdf. If you use the wrong file name, we will still review your application — but we’ll be wasting time looking for your files instead of thinking about them, and we’ll probably be a little grumpy about that!
Step 3:
Find Someone to Speak for You
Getting to know any human being on the basis of a few sheets of paper is impossible. We need a lot more insight in order to really learn who you are, how we might be able to support you, and what you might contribute to one of our Host Institutions. One key way we do that is by asking folks who already know you to share their perspectives.
So, we need you to find two other human beings who will each write us a letter all about you. These folks can be anyone you want: teachers, bosses, coaches, mentors, or anything else. You can even request letters of recommendation from a friend or a family member, if you want — though keep in mind that most other applicants will have letters from professors and the like, which can make it hard for a letter from a loved one to stand out.
One letter should discuss your aptitude, skills, passion and potential in your chosen field or fields, whether that be engineering, science, policy, business, journalism, or whatever else. In a sense, this letter is about what you can do well now, and what you might be able to learn to do well in the future.
One letter should discuss your character, creativity, and consistency. These are traits that people bring to every part of their life: not just school and work, but also home, clubs, religious groups, community organizations, and more. In a sense, this letter is about you who fundamentally are as person.
You will be able to request these letters directly through our application portal, Survey Monkey Apply. Please ask the people writing these letters to look out for an email from Survey Monkey with the link to submit their letter directly to our application portal. We strongly recommend that you connect with your letter writers before putting their information into Survey Monkey, to ensure that they are willing and able to submit the letter on time, and to tell them what content to cover in their letter.
If you never asked for a Letter of Recommendation before, we have prepared a downloadable PDF guide to help you!
Both letters of recommendation should be submitted by our deadline of October 12, 2025.
Step 4:
Tell Us What You Want Most in a Job
One key to the success of the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship is the way we help connect our talented, hardworking, and driven Fellows with the companies that are the best fit for their current abilities and future potential.
If you aren’t already working in aerospace, it can be very hard to tell what jobs even exist. It’s hard to get data on what each company is really like, and what range of career paths might be open to you. Even once you’ve identified places of interest, it can be hard to get their attention. Our matching process is designed to help solve that challenge.
You are probably used to applying to specific openings at specific companies or organizations, but that's not how we work. Instead, every year we curate a list of incredible companies who are doing amazing thing in aviation or space, and who also give real tasks and real development opportunities to their internships while honoring and celebrating Black excellence in aerospace. We are reviewing the list of companies we think will be the best fits for members of our Class of 2026 now, and will reveal the final list candidates who have been selected as semi-finalists.
We then gather an enormous volume of data from both hosts and applicants and then use that to set up specific interview pairings.
To do this, we'll ask you several questions about what interests you the most. There’s no universally right answer to these questions, but there probably is a right answer for you, right now. The more thoughtful you are in considering your responses, the better matches we might suggest. Examples of the kinds of questions we might ask you are: do you prefer working on small teams, or big teams? What do you value most in a potential internship: the company culture, the potential pathway to a full time job there, your exposure to new things, the location, the specifics of the role, or the opportunity to network?
So, we encourage you to spend some time thinking about those things, and weighing your own preferences and inclinations. You may be open to lots of different paths — and that’s good to know! Or you may have a very specific journey in mind; and that’s good for us to know, as well.
Want some advice about how to think about what host company might be right for you? Our alumni have you covered! Please check out this Guide to Selecting Host Companies.
Step 5:
Share Your Perspective with Us in a Written Essay
All parts of this application are important, but you should spend most of your time and energy on Steps 5, 6, and 7.
Like we’ve said before, transcripts and résumés are useful sources of information, but at the end of the day, they are just pieces of paper. Letters of recommendation help, but only show us the perspective of other people. We find it most useful to learn about our candidates by asking them to create.
Accordingly, as part of our application, we require you to create three original works. In here in Step 5, we’ll talk about the first of these: the PGSF Essay.
Please write an original essay of between 500 and 750 words directly answering this prompt: Based on your lived experience and on the perspective you bring from your community, upbringing, and education to date, what do you bring to the aerospace workforce? How do you want to focus your personal efforts and contributions in aerospace to make your communities and the world as a whole a better place?
Unlike the next two things you create, this essay will only be shared with the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship’s internal Selection Committee, to determine if you advance to the Semi-Finalist and Finalist rounds of our comprehensive selection process. You should be the sole author of the essay. While you are permitted to us AI tools like ChatGPT to aid you in your process, please keep in mind that AI-generated essays are generally of middling quality, and are unlikely to help you earn an interview, much less a position.
Like your transcript and your resume, your essay should be submitted as a PDF following the same filename pattern: 2026PGSF_Lastname_Firstname_Essay.pdf. Our old friend Cindi Mayweather would name her file: 2026PGSF_Mayweather_Cindi_Essay.pdf.
Need a little bit of help in crafting your essays? Our alumni have you covered! Please check out this Guide to Creating Essays.
Step 6:
Flex Your Creative Muscles with a Multimedia Piece
The second work will be something we call the 'Multimedia Essay' – which means it will take essentially any format that isn't a written prose essay. Please feel free to choose the media that best reflects you, your interests, and your talents, whether that is a video, a spoken word performance, a song, an animation, a written work of fiction, a comic book, or anything else. We would, of course, love to be surprised.
For the format of your multimedia essay, the only limitations we have are the following:
we cannot accept physical submission via snail mail or any other means (you can, however, create something physical and then submit a photo or a video capturing that thing);
no software that isn’t more or less universally and freely available should be required to review your submission;
a member of our selection committee or a hiring manager at one of our Host Institutions must be able to review your submission within a five-minute window;
life will be much easier for all of us if you keep the file size for your submissions below 250 MB.
You should be the sole creator of the multimedia essay, but other people can appear in it if you think that helps you tell the story you want to tell with your answer (like, for example, if you’ve choreographed a piece for your full dance crew).
Your Multimedia Essay should directly address this prompt: GPAs and college transcripts don’t paint a complete picture of a person. What else do we need to know about you?
If you advance to the final round of our selection process, your Multimedia Essay will be shared with your prospective employers at our Host companies. As we review your Multimedia Essay, we are eager to learn more about your personality, your creativity, and your way of thinking. Don’t be afraid to bring your true self to the project, and to incorporate your own style into what you submit.
One note: yes, this is an aerospace program. Unless you are hoping to land an internship creative space art (it could happen!), we probably aren’t going to be evaluating your Multimedia Essay to see if you are the best video producer, the best rapper, or the best comic book artist. And no matter what, we are not reviewing applications to see who has the most expensive camera or best video editing software. Work with the tools you have at hand, whether that is the built-in mic of an old smartphone or a professional studio. We’ll treat them equally, while focusing on you. Your submissions should be clear. If the quality of the audio or video is so low that the Selection Committee can’t properly review it, well, that would impact our review. But beyond that threshold, there’s nothing that would be held against you.
And again, don’t miss out on our free Guide to Creating Your Essays!
Step 7:
Answer One More Question for Us.
New for our Class of 2026, we are requiring a third submission.
This one can take the form of a multimedia essay or a written essay -- it's your choice. This third essay will also be shared with your potential employers at our host companies, should you advance to the final round of selection for our Fellowship.
The purpose of this essay is to teach our selection committee and your perspective employers as much as we can learn about your professional and academic interests, your fundamental character, your critical thinking abilities, and your communications skills. Therefore, in addition to the content of your response to your chosen prompt, we will also be paying attention to how effectively you communicate your response to a specific question. Please review your essay carefully before submitting, and consider: did you make a point clearly and concisely? Did you organize your thoughts to best convey your ideas? Did you write persuasively? Those skills are valuable in any job, and this is a chance for you to show our selection committee and your potential future colleagues in aerospace what you can do!
You can select whichever of these prompts you'd like. Please make sure you include the prompt in your essay somehow, so that it is obvious to everyone reviewing your application knows the prompt you are addressing:
The aerospace community is imperfect, and includes community members and leaders who do not share our Fellowships’ views on how people respect and value each other. How do you personally decide when to engage with those industry colleagues / leaders, when to ignore them, and when to push back?
Please tell us about a project you started on your own. Why did you start it, and what did you learn?
What technology, policy, or business model would you like to see developed in the next ~25 years that you feel would transform the aviation or space industry?
Service comes in many forms. People can serve in many locations and at many different scales, from one’s own home to the planet as a whole. And service can be meaningful and impactful whether the money or expertise involved is big or small. Which act of service that you have performed means the most to you, and why?
Imagine a friend of yours has an idea for an aerospace start-up company, and asks for your help developing the idea, gathering resources, and getting started. Assuming you were excited about the potential of the idea, how would you help?
How would you change the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship itself to make the program have a greater impact on the Fellows or on the industry as a whole?
If you have ever applied to the Patti Grace Fellowship before, what do you think is the biggest way you have changed or grown since your last application?
Please follow the same length, formatting, and file-naming standards listed in Step 5 and Step 6 above.
Step 8:
Send It.
If you’ve got all that, you are ready to go!
Simply click on the big orange button that says, “Click Here to Apply!” below. That will take you to our online application portal. If you need help navigating the application portal, please check out our new Guide to How to Apply with Survey Monkey.
Remember, if you need a bit of encouragement or want to ask a question before you submit your application, you may want to sign up for the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship Applicant Discord, which has been created and supported by our alumni.
Good luck! We can’t wait to hear from you.