My name is Wolfgang Struven. I am 23 years old. I am a student at Joliet Junior College. Technically I would be going into my junior year. I tried starting college post-pandemic, but I wasn’t ready and had to take a gap year. 

I’m currently on track to transfer to UIUC soon, hopefully to graduate in late 2026 or early 2027. I also just got engaged, and plan to be married in either April of 2026 or 2027.

My name is Allison. I'm 20 years old, and I'm going to be a junior and starting at North Central College in Naperville.

I plan on becoming a mechanical engineer. I have about two and a half years left of school. Two years at Joliet Junior College, and then two more at North Central.

I hope to do my four years, get my bachelor's, and go into mechanical engineering with that. Just get a job from there and then see, maybe research, but just that's where I'd wanna go. 

I’m Casey Garrett. I am 22 years old and a sophomore at Joliet Junior College.

I'm working on finishing my associate's right now, and once I do that, I'm going to move on to working for a bachelor's in nuclear engineering at Urbana Champaign. 

Early on, I went to Western Illinois University, year 2020, and failed that, and then later went back to school at Joliet Junior College. At the time I was looking into pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering. But as I went through and took more and more chemistry classes, I found out exactly how much I enjoyed doing chemistry and different types of chemistry. I was like, hey, actually, I think I could do this for a living, and change my aim toward nuclear engineering, And that’s where I'm at now, working toward that.

I plan on trying to work towards being a nuclear operator. But also, I think if given the opportunity, working at some place like Argonne or Fermi, doing nuclear engineering stuff would be really, really cool. 

I've actually been doing some research of my own. I was originally under the guide of a professor at U of I but not any longer. It was originally my idea to do the research, which is to look for a nebula in the New General Catalog, or the NGC that was lost over 100 years ago. No one knows what happened to it. It could have been an erroneous observation, or a duplicate observation, which is what many have theorized it to be. But what really drew me to it was that the name of it is Struve’s Lost Nebula and was discovered by Otto Wilhelm von Struve. He has the same last name as me, and as I would later find out, I am distantly related to him.

That's originally how I discovered this nebula, or discovered it in the catalog. Why is there a nebula with my last name on here? That's partly what inspired me to do that research. But it has now kind of turned into this whole fascination with the interstellar medium (ISM), because this research is essentially an ISM project. The nebula was seen near the original T Tauri, which its name was then applied to a whole class of stars. It’s basically like the teenage years of a star. And this nebula, if it exists, is basically in the ISM around the star, no less than half a light year from the star.

The ISM really fascinates me, especially since the Voyager One and Two spacecraft that we launched in 1978 finally started to enter the ISM. They've taken some very fascinating readings. Another distant relative of mine who was an astronomer, actually was director of the Yerkes Observatory, Otto Struve, grandson of Otto Wilhelm von Struve. He was a pioneering researcher in discovering that there, in fact, are clouds of gas in interstellar space by isolating their spectral lines from background objects. The ISM fascinates me, because it could be either the next generation or the one after that could be going into interstellar space, going to distant stars. I would love to understand that because if we end up colonizing distant planets, we should at least have a good understanding of the vast sea of space to get there! To me, studying the ISM like trying to build a map of unknown lands, sort of like cartographers of old.  Ferdinand Magellan, for example.

That’s actually part of what drew me to the South Pole Telescope program. I really like the South Pole Telescope because Antarctica itself is very fascinating. It's essentially the final frontier of the earth. When you're there it feels like you're on another planet. It's so inhospitable to life. You might think, “Well, why is that cool? Just sounds awful.” To me, it’s because it's like you're on another planet. It's like you're on the cusp of human knowledge.

My mom took me to a Girls in Engineering Day at Olivet Nazarene University when I was 10. She took me there and they had games where you could build stuff. So I thought that was really interesting. And then from there, she gently guided me in that direction. And then I've just liked it ever since.

I’m minoring in environmental studies, so I'm hoping to build machines that'll help the environment. So machines along that line, building, problem solving, to help the world we live in. 

I’m thinking places like Exxon Mobil because they're environmentally friendly, and they're working towards that sort of thing.

I'm a first-generation college student, but growing up, I remember that my dad was always a bit of a technophile. He was really into science and astronomy and cosmology and all that. I remember watching a bunch of those space shows in the background when I was a little. I would say that's probably most of the inspiration I got in order to go, “Oh my god, this is so awesome. I'm so happy I get to do this.”

It's made me appreciate just how diverse the perspectives on science can be. It has also made me kind of feel more at home. This isn't just a regular nine-to-five, it is really just you and a bunch of smart people getting together to solve this really cool problem or complete a really cool project. In the end, it's like, hey, we did something really, really cool. We just measured something from, literally, on the other side of the universe. I'd say working with other people has made academia far less intimidating. 

With the programming, it's definitely an adjustment. We use SolidWorks here. In the past, I've used AutoCAD inventor. It's been an adjustment all around to learn the programming, which slows you down on your project, but they're similar enough to where it didn't take a huge amount of time. And Alec was very helpful because he knows the program really well, so he gave me tutorials and stuff like that. It's been very helpful.

I think they're very open to be there whenever you need help. Obviously, everyone has their own jobs to do. So finding time to meet can be a problem. But I find everyone's like, “I have this this amount of time, let's meet then and go over everything”. So they're very good at keeping up with you and making sure you're doing good, making sure everything's going the way it should, so you don't feel like you're alone at all.

The chairs in here are uncomfortable for long ends of time. But other than that, it's been It feels self-led, which is interesting. I enjoy all the people here. It's nice talking with people who are very smart and generally knowledgeable in their fields. And the work itself is, I'd say it's decently fulfilling. I've been enjoying it here.

I’ve mostly been working with Dr. Benson and Alec, and they've both been very busy throughout the entire part. Brad seems to have more than a full plate, but they've given me and Alison enough guidance in order to try and actually undertake the task. It's mostly been like a guidance thing, and trying to catch us up on all the classes we haven't taken. We're the JJC students here, so we are slightly less prepared for this, but, at no point have I felt that they have inadequately prepared me.