Carter Waligura
About Carter Waligura
While high-speed aerodynamics is my current passion, I have most often filled the systems engineer role over the past several years of higher education. I started my undergraduate degree fascinated with mechanical engineering and computer-aided design software. I never liked coding very much, but always enjoyed being able to create something complex and useful out of simple shapes, cuts, and rotations. The shift to analysis started at my first internship at Comsat Architects, a startup space company in Cleveland OH. At the start of the internship, I loathed coding and complex analysis, but by the end of that summer I had signed up as a student contractor to continue aiding in MATLAB-Orbital STK coupled communication link analysis and CubeSat design in support of the NASA Lunar Gateway. Next, I started my first of two internships at Textron. The first focused on project management and the ability to pick up neglected which interested me. Through this experience, I really learned how to work on projects which were much bigger than just me. This experience's diversity in projects and workgroups gave me a new perspective on how broad a career in engineering can be. Following this internship, I had a flurry of other experiences which had a one project focus. During my aerospace senior design project, I found myself in a completely new place. As team lead of a 6 person team, I was tasked with putting together the best roundtrip to Mars for 4 crew members and a rover large enough for a 30-day surface stay. This experience was one of my most intimate experiences with engineering as I found myself bouncing from structures to thermal systems, to nuclear propulsion, and then back to habitat design all in an hour period. Finally, undergraduate research on rotation detonation engines was able to spark my interest in high-speed, and CFD in general. Now at MIT, I have already had the pleasure of working with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory on real-world hypersonic problems, and have started working with Draper Laboratory on similar projects. Even so, all the time during my independent research and classes I find myself reusing the same skills from years ago. Hypersonic problems are inherently coupled and multidisciplinary. Aerodynamics are coupled to heat transfer just as much as to the structures or propulsion system. While I could not have known it at the time, my past experiences have kept me prepared for a field that requires an engineering systems approach.