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hi my name is Victor Mejia I am a summer

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engine here I came in through the NASA

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must program Italy minority education

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office and this is my fourth summer here

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I'm working on the image processing

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laboratory they get these huge images

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from JPL flight instruments but often

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there are too large to view on a

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standard computer or even

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high-definition television screens they

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create these animations where you zoom

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in and then you can across these images

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to view them in detail this is important

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for scientists for certain areas of say

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Mars that they want to explore or mainly

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for the media and things like that

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these animations they often take time to

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make what they wanted to do is to

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automate the entire process they give me

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part of the task to do to write the

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software to automate the creation of

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these animations what I am thrilled

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about this summer is that my software is

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actually gonna be used by real scientist

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but the first couple years of my life I

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lived in South LA so that was pretty

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rough after that I lived in Boyle

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Heights for a couple years it was around

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the time what gangs were pretty big you

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know I mean tinging gang members my

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neighborhood was just pretty normal

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my mom's has been a single parent since

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I was five years old so that that was

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definitely another source of motivation

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for me to just push harder for education

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you do real work here you know I mean at

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the beginning when they give me the task

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for a couple of weeks I was like this is

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impossible you know what they want me to

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do it but then you work through it you

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know you talk to people you get some

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help and once you get something working

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is so rewarding it's definitely helping

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me for the future I mean it's it's

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helped me decide what I actually want to

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do for bats for a while I didn't want to

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go into computer science forgets or

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either in image processing or software

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engineering if I had any advice to give

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definitely not to be discouraged what

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happens a lot of summer interns here is

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that they get a summer task or they have

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to learn a computer language that

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they've never learned there's actually

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what I love about here that you can come

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here and not have the necessary tools to

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do what you're supposed to do but you

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learn them here on the spot and then you

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walk off and going back to school with