APPLICATIONS FOR THE CLASS OF 2023 ARE NOW CLOSED

Step 0: Check Your Eligibility

This one is easy. To be eligible to become a Patti Grace Smith Fellow, all of these things should be true.

1. You should be Black or African-American. If that’s the box you checked on your Census form, then that works for us!

2. *NEW THIS YEAR* You should be a current student in a Bachelors Degree program or in any year of an Associates Degree program. (Note in previous years the fellowship was only open to first and second year undergraduate students. All undergraduate students are now eligible to apply).

3. You should be a US Citizen or US Permanent Resident.

4. You should be seeking your first ever paid job / internship in aerospace.

If you meet those four requirements, you are eligible! Students of any gender, any age, any economic class, any major, any GPA, any college or university, and any anything are eligible if they meet those four requirements.

Step 2: 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.

Please ask the folks writing your letter to tell us about this kind of stuff:

• How quickly do you learn new things?

• How curious are you?

• How hard do you work?

• What do you contribute to your community (this could be any type of community)?

• How creative are you?

• How interested are you in aerospace?

• How might you benefit from mentorship?

*NEW THIS YEAR* Your letters of recommendation can be requested directly through the Reviewr application portal, so we recommend that you create an account and submit their information to get the letter requests sent out as soon as possible.

And as with your transcripts, CVs, and more, it would be very helpful to have these letters come in with a specific filename. We therefore politely request that your recommenders submit their letters as PDFs with the following filename pattern: 
2022PGSF_CandidateLastname_RecommenderLastname.pdf.
So, if a person named Meg Murry is writing a candidate for our hypothetical candidate named Cindi Mayweather, the file should be named: 2022PGSSF_Mayweather_ Murry.pdf

And don’t worry: we would never punish an applicant just because their letter writers didn’t follow the rules. If the file names are wrong; we’ll figure it out. And if they don’t write about what we asked, we will do our absolute best to compare your letters to the others we receive on a totally equal basis.

And *NEW THIS YEAR* you can even monitor the progress of your letter writer’s submissions on the Reviewr portal and send them reminders directly. As we get close to the end of the application period, we will even do our best to warn you as our deadline approaches if we are still missing one or both of your letters – and even to accommodate letters that come in just a little late.

If you never asked for a Letter of Recommendation before, our friends at the Brooke Owens Fellowship have prepared an excellent guide for how to do it! Our requirements are slightly different, but that guide is still very useful. They also prepared an additional guide for how to write good letters of recommendation, which may be worth checking out, too.

Both letters of recommendation should be submitted by our deadline of October 23, 2022.

Step 3: Choose Which Jobs You Want the Most

One unique aspect of the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship and our sister programs is the way we match Fellows with jobs — specifically, with paid summer internships. You are probably used to applying to specific openings at specific companies or organizations, but that's not how we work. Instead, we 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 need several inputs from you to help us understand what would make the most successful summer possible. On the application form, you'll notice that we ask you to rank a bunch of different job attributes—for example, what kind of industries are you interested in working for? This helps us get to know what you’re interested in and what sorts of companies might be a good fit during the matching process.

Step 4. Flex a Little With a Creative Essay

Okay, here’s where things get really interesting. 

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 two original works. In here in Step 4, we’ll talk about the first of these: the Essay.

Please write an original essay of between 500 and 750 words directly answering one of the following prompts. Please paste the prompt you have chosen at the top of your essay. You should be the sole author of the essay. If you have applied in the past, we encourage you to revamp your essay or respond to a different prompt.

The essay prompts:

1. GPAs and college transcripts don’t paint a complete picture of a person. What else do we need to know about you?

2. What would more Blackness bring to the Aerospace Industry? How would a significant change in the diversity of this industry, and specifically in the number of Black contributors and leaders, change the Aerospace Industry itself?

3. 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?

4. There are many valuable talents, skills, and traits that aren’t taught in the classroom or workplace. What thing that you have learned outside of the classroom or workplace do you think will do the most to make you a better teammate at an aerospace company? In what way, and why?

5. It takes time to get fully up to speed at any new job – but what is something you would add to a team or a project in your first week on the job?

6. When you find yourself faced with a difficult academic or professional challenge, something right at or just beyond the edge of your ability, how do you attack the problem?

The purpose of this essay is to teach us as much as we can learn about your professional and academic interests, your fundamental character, your critical thinking abilities, and your communications skills. The more we learn about you through your application, the better!

In addition to the content of your response to your chosen prompt, we will also be paying attention to the way you’ve written your essay. 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!

And yep, you guessed it. Your essay should be submitted as a PDF following the same filename pattern: 2022PGSF_Lastname_Firstname_Essay.pdf. Our old friend Cindi Mayweather would name her file: 2022PGSF_Mayweather_Cindi_Essay.pdf

Step 5: Show Us the Real You in a Video

Please submit a brief video (less than five minutes long - we will stop watching after five minutes) that specifically addresses one of the prompts below. Please have the prompt you have chosen appear in your video, either as audio or as on-screen text. Please make sure whatever you send us is in a format that our selection committee members will be able to access without needing special software or a password to access — and trust us, life will be much, much easier for all of us if you keep the file size for your submissions below 250 MB.   

You should be the creator of the video, and the content should be your answer to the prompt – but other people can appear in the video if you think that helps you tell the story you want to tell with your answer. The video can take any format you’d like: it can be you talking straight to the camera, it can be a conversation between multiple people on screen.

With your video, we are eager to learn more about your personality and your creativity. Don’t be afraid to bring your true self to the video, and to incorporate your own style into what you submit. It is important to note that we do not grade our applicants to see who is the best video producer, and most definitely not on who has the fanciest 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.

Your video should answer one of these prompts:

1. 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?

2. How do you want to focus your personal efforts and contributions in aerospace to make the world a better place?

3. Not everyone loves aviation or space exploration as much as we do. What do you do when confronted by a person – perhaps a family member or a childhood friend – who doesn’t understand your excitement about aerospace?

4. What current trend or opportunity in aerospace gives you the most hope and inspiration?

5. We have a varying array of host companies that have diverse work environments and team cultures. What kind of work environment or team culture makes you thrive? And what do you bring to the table when you are in that culture or environment?

When you've got the video completed, you can directly upload the file through our application.

Step 6: Submit Your Application

If you’ve got all that, you are ready to go! Our application portal, Reviewr, has all sorts of handy features like letting you save your work, and it’s pretty straightforward to use. For a tutorial on how to use this portal, check out this Brookie Guide to the Reviewr Application Portal.

We suggest you make an account with your email right away so that you can check out the system — and so that you can start the process of collecting your two letters of recommendation.

Then, when you are ready to finish your application, return to the portal to upload the rest of your application materials.

Good luck! We can’t wait to hear from you.