• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2022

• The University of Texas at Austin, Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, ‘23

• Host Institution: United Launch Alliance

• Executive Mentor: May Rosekrans

• Brookie Mentor: Sophie Amiton

Shreya Bhattacharjee is an Aerospace Engineering junior at the University of Texas at Austin. With an insatiable thirst to explore, Shreya pursued a wide variety of interests, from law to writing to music, until she stumbled into the world of engineering. She realized it was the perfect arena for her to apply her love for creativity, abstract thinking, logic, and problem-solving, and so began her journey into engineering. After scouting around some more and an inspiring conversation with one of the Mars Mission Finalists, Shreya decided to take the dive into aerospace engineering and hasn’t looked back since!
In her time at UT, Shreya has continued exploring her interests and purpose. As a freshman, Shreya was inducted into the Women in Entrepreneurship and Leadership Development (WIELD) Fellowship Program, where she began to explore her identities as a leader and individual while learning the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. The following year, she served as the Finance and Resource Director for Re-Sonate UT to help build a community for multi-disciplinary women interested in the tech industry. In 2021, Shreya took a gap year to complete an 11-month Pathways Internship at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. At Wallops, she served as the Project Manager and Assistant Project Manager for numerous projects and launch operations missions. Some of her most memorable moments were spent in the Control Center during launches, and for her last mission, she got the unique opportunity to complete the final Go/No-Go checks before launch. During the last few months of her internship, she also started a position as the Structures Lead for the SCOPE CubeSat Mission at the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory (TSL). Her short time in TSL led to a new opportunity as the SERPENT Mission Deputy Chief Engineer, which she is extremely excited to learn in and grow in over these next few months.
Outside of aerospace and academics, Shreya loves exploring, reading, doing yoga, and dancing. If she’s not going on adventures to see new places during her free time, she’s home reading some obscure historical fiction and mystery novel, doing yoga along with meditation or journaling, or playing some high-energy music and dancing around the apartment.
As a Brooke Owens Fellow, Shreya will spend Summer 2022 as a Systems Engineering Intern at the United Launch Alliance in Centennial, CO.