Math major prepares for teaching career

Kim Margosian landed an unusual internship for an aspiring teacher.

The math major at Cal State Monterey Bay is spending the summer at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base through the CSU’s Science Teacher and Researcher (STAR) program.

The STAR program selects teachers-to-be – upper division science, math and engineering majors and teaching credential students – as fellows. After an orientation, the fellows are sent for nine-week paid internships at national laboratories and other research centers to investigate technical questions along challenging lines of research while working with the labs’ engineers and scientists.

Margosian started to look for a research internship last fall “because I wanted to have an experience using my math skills doing something other than teaching or tutoring,” she said.

“When I heard about the STAR internship, I felt compelled to pursue the opportunity. Who wouldn’t be drawn to an opportunity to work for NASA?”

At Dryden, she will work on math-based modeling and simulation to better understand physical phenomena. “Modeling and simulation help us reduce cost and reduce risk by increasing our understanding of required tests,” she said.

She’ll use simulation data and flight data to correlate simulated predictions on aircraft configurations.

Margosian, who will graduate next spring, has wanted to be a math teacher since she was a seventh-grader in Elk Grove, near Sacramento. She had struggled with math in elementary school, but her pre-algebra teacher helped her turn that around. “Then, the teacher asked me to tutor my fellow students,” Margosian said.

“As I excelled in math, my performance in my other classes improved as well. From then on, all my math teachers pushed me to be better and work harder.”

At CSUMB, she works as an instructional student assistant, tutoring for various math classes. That experience will no doubt help her once she earns a teaching credential and is in the classroom.

“I plan to teach algebra at the high school level in Monterey County,” she said.

The STAR program is coordinated on behalf of the CSU system by the Center for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

In 2007, the first 16 STAR fellows were dispatched as paid interns to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Since then, the program has grown steadily; this year, 70 fellows were placed at 14 labs around the country.

Part of the CSU’s Mathematics and Science Teacher Initiative, STAR seeks to help address the need for 33,000 more math and science teachers in California over the next decade by improving teacher recruitment, education and professional development, and retention rates.

To learn about the math program at CSUMB, click here.

To learn about CSU's STAR program, click here.

Update

"My STAR internship was fantastic," Kim Margosian said. Her project involved studying the aeroelastic behavior of a wing. "In other words, I analyzed data reflecting wingtip flutter of a wing," she said.

She met two astronauts during her time at Edwards Air Force Base. And she participated in weely professional development seminars on teaching practices that can be used to incorporate her research into her future classroom.

"It was truly a life-changing experience and I would do it again in a heartbeat," she said.

In November, Margosian was contacted by her summer mentor with good news – she will be a co-author on his paper to be published in 2013.