HOW IT WORKS

The Patti Grace Smith Fellowship has a proven record of success helping companies meet their business goals and their workforce needs by attracting top-tier talent that is currently outside of the aerospace workforce. To do this, we use a system and method that has been proven to work again and again, across multiple different disciplines, demographics, and even nations. Here’s how it works.

First, we connect with great American companies and institutions doing incredible things in aerospace. If these companies are thinking about the future of their workforce, they believe in having robust internship programs that provide meaningful, challenging work to undergraduate students — the kind of internships programs that simultaneously provide real contributions to the company and also help students hone their skills and learn valuable techniques. Each year, we invite about two dozen of these companies to participate in our program by potentially hosting a Fellow (or multiple Fellows). Each company decides on their own whether this proposition is a valuable one for them. At this point, we have a waiting list of several dozen companies who have expressed an interest in hosting Patti Grace Smith Fellows.

Next, we connect with students and faculty members at colleges and universities around the United States. We seek to find students with incredible potential who are interested in aerospace but who are not yet in the aerospace workforce. Some of these students are just beginning their careers, while others may have gone back to school to start a second career — but none of them have worked in aerospace before.

Due to the export control laws and regulations that have such significance in the US aerospace industry, all of our candidates must be US Persons (as defined by 22 C.F.R. § 120.17 and 15 C.F.R. § 734.13). To best suit the business needs of the companies we work with, we recruit from one of the populations that the US aerospace industry historically has had the hardest time recruiting from, the Black and African-American population. Students can be at any year in their undergraduate education, at any school, and studying any major — though they must have skills and interests relevant to working in some part of the aerospace industry (most commonly engineering or science, but also including policy, business, journalism, and other fields). And above all, these must be incredibly talented students, the kind of students whose skills and work ethic will carry them to the top of any applicant pool. Whether they show that talent through their GPA, their extracurriculars, their “side hustles,” or anything else, the talent needs to be undeniably there.

After recruiting hundreds of applicants from colleges all across the nation, we then begin an extensive review and selection process. Our commitment is that every application is reviewed in full by two real human beings: we do not rely on any automated filters or simplistic keyword searches. In a typical year, every application receives at least an hours worth of attention and contemplation from aerospace professionals. On the basis of those reviews, we invite approximately 125 students to participate in interviews with our team. We use those interviews to assess each candidate’s professional aptitude, growth potential, leadership qualities, and community mindset. These interviews, all conducted by aerospace professionals, also help us identify the specific companies that might be the best match for each candidate. After we complete those interviews, approximately 75 candidates are invited to advance to the final step of our selection process.

In this final phase, each company receives from us a small number of candidates to review — typically between five and ten. Each of the candidates will have already received a top notch ranking from our selection committee — usually meaning they have been ranked as having either high or extremely high talent and potential by a minimum of three and as many as eight different aerospace professionals who have reviewed their application. What’s more, these candidates will have been identified as good matches for that specific company, based on each company’s culture, projects, and priorities.

Each company then has a chance to review these applicants and to put them through their normal selection process. Many companies will have their candidates perform multiple rounds of technical interviews, submit examples of prior work, solve technical problems, and more. These candidates are being evaluated not only against each other but also against every other candidate who has applied for an internship directly.

No company is obliged to accept any candidate. No spots are held, no standards are relaxed, and no bars are lowered. Patti Grace Smith Candidates must meet every threshold every other intern at the company meets, in addition to meeting all of the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship’s requirements. On occasion, a company will decline all of the candidates that have been presented to them, if they see better fits for their internship openings among their general candidate pool — although it is much more common that they will seek to hire many or even all of the candidates that we provide them.

Once we have reviewed all of the hiring rankings and decisions from the companies, we will finalize our selection of that year’s class of Fellows. Each Fellow will be one intern among many at their host company, joining talented students from all backgrounds to contribute to exciting missions and projects.

All of this recruiting and selection assistance is provided to the host companies at no cost. On-going services provided to Fellows after they have been hired — including our annual summit and a small scholarship for each Fellow — are provided with no overhead costs or fees.

The Patti Grace Smith Fellowship is operated almost entirely by volunteers (with the equivalent of one quarter of one full time employee in total). It has received no government funding to date, with all of its operations supported by volunteer efforts and by philanthropic donations. If you’d like to support the mission of the Fellowship, please consider making a one-time or recurring donation!