Final Job Description

 Resource Analyst Intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

When people think of NASA they think of scientists making ground-breaking discoveries. But, there is also a less glamorous role, one that involves business majors! That’s what I did. People may find it confusing that there are business roles in NASA, which is fair. Employees in business roles manage missions and administrative programs. Specifically, there is a role known as the Resource Analyst Internship. People in this role help launch and complete mission goals.

A Resource Analyst Intern gets to work under older Resource Analysts on missions. Throughout the process of the internship, they learn from the team's full-time employees. The interns get handed down the lighter versions of Resource Analyst tasks. You can usually find these interns holed up in a cubicle or eating lunch in the cafeteria with fellow interns. You can also find them sitting in on meetings with full-time staff as silent as a mouse.

There are three descriptions that help to sum up the duties of a resource analyst intern

• Teacher/Exam Grader

• Detective

• Janitor

I’ll describe the work of a typical Resource Analyst Intern using these three examples for comparison.

Teacher/Exam Grader

A large part of the responsibilities of Resource Analyst Interns is to track the progress and status of the mission. The missions that I worked on were the Mars 2020 rover and the flagship Mars Sample Return program. In this role, think of a teacher who grades exams. They look at students’ responses in exams and mark areas where there are discrepancies from the expected answer. They also help students improve for the next test. Teachers work to develop strategies and reinforcements that benefit those they teach. Resource Analysts Interns do something similar by working with project managers to make sure everything is on track. At the beginning of each mission, engineers and scientists forecast how long they think building a component will take. As they are building, they update the timeline with their progress. At the end of each month, Resource Analysts and their interns identify areas with differences in expected and actual progress. When differences occur, Resource Analysts contact scientists and project managers. Together they work together to develop a plan to get back on track. It is the role of a Resource Analyst to "grade" the progress reports and provide advice to areas that are lagging. The equivalent of “finishing the class” is the completion of the mission! Missions can last for years or even decades. In terms of overall grading, imagine a class organized in a pass/fail format. The mission either succeeds or it doesn’t.

Detective

Another responsibility of Resource Analyst Interns resembles that of a detective. Detectives look at situations and data and are able to pull insights to solve mysteries. They find trends and they use their analytical abilities to find important information. In the role of the Resource Analyst Intern, we look for patterns and important insights in past financial and operational data. For example, one task is to use software like Excel, Power Pivot, Power Query, and Dax functions to see graphs and charts to help visualize patterns. All you have to know about the software I just mentioned is that they are data analysis tools. Resource Analyst Interns play with the data to show potential areas of concern. The interns will examine this data and also create programs to make automated charts. Afterward, they present findings to their managers and suggest potential solutions for the issues that they find. This detective role that Resource Analysts and their interns play is incredibly important. The investigative efforts uncover threats that might derail the mission. It also creates better and more efficient practices to use in other NASA missions.

Janitor

Another responsibility of a Resource Analyst Intern is like that of a janitor. Janitors go through buildings and rooms and clean them. They make things neat and make sure to remove items that aren’t supposed to be there. If there are objects that are out of place they will often put them back into order. They use tools and supplies to ensure that areas are clean and useable for the future. Like a janitor, a Resource Analyst Intern looks back at past files and makes sure everything is in order. They sort data and update titles and file codes. They also reconfigure the data files to various types if needed. When there are incorrect codes used, they look up the new codes and clean the file by inserting the right codes. It is important to keep files and data orderly when dealing with large-scale projects. When key information on multi-billion dollar expenses is incorrect or hard to find, missions can become very chaotic.

Flesch Reading Ease: 57.5

Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level: 8.7

Passive Sentences: 0%