Rishay Jain has been fascinated by aviation since he started building plans at 8 years old.
“I just always loved making things fly — whether it was with cardboard foam, flying remotely (or) building drones,” he said. “Freshman year, I was designing, building and programming all these things on my own. You can solve problems with this stuff — it’s the aerospace industry.”
The innovation of the aerospace industry fascinates Jain.
“I’m (always) excited to see what’s going on,” he said. “(And) within aerospace, I want to stay at the cutting edge of space technology: how to put humanity further and further into space, putting people on Mars or putting autonomous robots that can make decisions for themselves light years away.”
At Gunn, Jain has constructed drones and other mechanizations, testing them in flight. One of these projects involved building a drone that could help survey wildfires for firefighters.
“I started (this project) after the 2020 wildfires and worked on it for a couple summers,” Jain said. “I’ve been working with firefighters from Menlo Park and Mountain View to build a drone affordable to the fire department, and it was through projects like this that got me interested in the professional side of aerospace engineering.”
Jain’s experience with drones helped him to land an internship at the Lockheed Martin Space Sciences and Instrumentation Center, where he works to track solar flares and their evolution. Eventually, Jain also hopes to work in the policy side of aerospace engineering.
“I want to also be guiding where we dedicate resources and regulate more of them to the space industry,” he said. “With the large emergence of private sectors and less government, it will be critical in how to regulate these companies and people in the aerospace industry.”
Next year, Jain will study aerospace engineering and potentially business at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I will continue working — apart from coursework — in rocketry teams (and) scientific-related research, perhaps at Lockheed and NASA,” he said.
