Apply Now for a Place in our Class of 2024

We are now accepting applications for our Class of 2024! We hope that you will consider applying yourself, if you are eligible, and that you will spread the word to every undergrad in your life who is considering a career in aerospace!

We designed this program to provide the most critical elements to get our Fellows' careers off to a great start.

1️⃣: Paid, awesome jobs at a leading aerospace company or agency. Our Fellows work with rockets, satellites, space stations, rovers, drones, airplanes, and more.

Our Fellows work as engineers, scientists, journalists, investment analysts, policymakers, and more.

Even better, we match our applicants up for interviews with employers they may not yet be familiar with, but which seem to align extremely well with their interests and skills.

2️⃣: One-on-one matches with two incredible mentors; one at the very top of the career ladder, and another just a rung or two ahead of our Fellow.

Those two perspectives are very different, and both are extremely useful.

3️⃣: Community, in the form of a cohort of like-minded, talented peers who also come from an underserved, underrepresented community.

Unlike what many of our allies and supporters personally experienced when entering this field, most of our applicants don't have a support community that shares both their interests and their demographics — which can be highly relevant to each person’s path and the tools they need to succeed.

We provide that community.

Those three things — jobs, mentors, and community — are universally helpful, we believe. But they are certainly not universally accessible. Too many communities have been too poorly served and too infrequently represented for too long by our aerospace industry.

The Patti Grace Smith Fellowship is dedicated to changing that for Black and African-American undergraduates in the United States.

We’re part of a growing community of Fellowship programs that provide similar things to their audiences. We highly recommend you check out these programs, and apply to them in addition to or instead of our Fellowship if you meet their eligibility requirements: the Brooke Owens Fellowship, the Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship, the Zed Factor Fellowship, Zenith Canada Pathways, and the Prospero Fellowship (UK).

One key to the success of our Fellowship is that we have recognized talent that the traditional aerospace industry has too often overlooked.

While aerospace has always been full of very talented people, too often, the community has looked for only one ‘flavor’ of talent, and often have looked only in a few places. In reality, talent manifests in countless ways, and in every place where there are people. And shines through on resumes and in job applications in even more ways, most of which were being missed or ignored by recruiters and hiring managers working in a traditional way.

Part of the way that our program and others like the Brooke Owens Fellowship outperform the industry standard is that we do not use any algorithmic, automated review of candidates; nor do we employ any keyword matching, nor things like GPA minimum thresholds.

Instead, every application is reviewed in full by two trained, human reviewers.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this makes our program easy to get into. Because of the overwhelming volume of talent that was going unrecognized and underserved, our program and the other Fellowships receive dramatically more extremely well qualified applicants that we can possibly select. But please don’t let that fact dissuade you from applying if you’re someone whose talent shines through in non-traditional ways.

GPAs in particular are poor predictors of a person’s ability to contribute to a team (and even worse measures of someone’s value as a person).That’s why our application process isn’t just built around school transcripts and CVs, nor even around Letters of Recommendation.

Your written and multimedia essays are so, so helpful in letting us see you, your talent, and your aspirations.

Which brings us to one interesting update in the Patti Grace Smith and Brooke Owens Fellowship application process this year. This is our first application season since tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney became widespread and (often) freely available.

We felt we had a choice to make about ChatGPT and the rest: ignore them, forbid them, or embrace them. We chose to embrace them as tools that can be used in a wide variety of ways, with their own flaws, but also their own strengths.

So, you’ll see that in this year‘s applications, we have essay prompts in both categories that specifically require you to use those kinds of LLM / ML tools — and to show your work in terms of how you use those tools and mitigate their weaknesses.

We will be very interested to see if & how those new prompts are used and how useful they are for making high-quality selections.

We did lots of research into how other groups are addressing these new ChatGPT-type tools, and this seems like the best path, but only time will tell.

So, to all our applicants out there: we wish you the best of luck! We encourage you to start soon and to put as much thought as you can into your essays in particular.

For any of you who are applying for a second, third, or fourth time, please know that repeat applicants are treated fairly and fondly.

If you aren’t eligible or simply aren’t interested right now, we still encourage you to spread the word to the undergraduate in your life about all of these programs, as well as great platforms like Space Workforce 2030’s National Space Interns program.

The Patti Grace Smith Fellowship and our sister programs have successfully changed lives, unlocked doors, launched careers, and embraced talent that was too often left outside a locked door by the traditional aerospace community and the typical way it recruits, selects, and promotes people.

We're honored to be changing the world in this important way. We hope you'll help us change the life of someone in your network by encouraging them to apply now!