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- Hi, my name's Dylan Dickstein.
I'm a third year PhD student here at UCLA
studying aerospace engineering,
and I'm an aspiring astronaut.
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We're at Weyburn Terrace where I've lived for now
the third year of graduate school
and where many other UCLA students
live for their graduate studies.
Photography and videography
are actually big hobbies of mine.
These are ones I took myself.
This is in Niagara Falls.
We have this one in Ohio River,
and that one there is in Detroit.
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- [Interviewer] So right now we're outside
of the classroom building where you take Russian.
Why are you taking Russian?
- A number of reasons.
One, probably the most apparent, is that right now
to fly as a NASA astronaut you actually have to be able
to speak and understand Russian to an intermediate level.
- Correct - I finished all my classes
for the PhD and I have my master's already,
but now I have the flexibility to take classes
that interest me and Russian is certainly one of them
for the astronaut thing, but in addition to the fact
that I love languages.
My mom was a French linguist and my dad's a journalist
and I've grown up with writing and reading and being
culturally aware is a big part of something
I aspire to be.
- So, how do you balance your Russian classes
but then also the rest of the PhD program
and then also your other activities
and the jobs you're working?
- Right.
I try to break up into an annual calendar
where the summer is a little bit more flexible for me,
school is not in session. but during the fall,
winter, and spring months, I am taking Russian
and flying and all the midst
working on my PhD dissertation which is approximately
150 pages of novel aerospace research.
- Would you say it's significantly different
from undergraduate experience?
Do you feel like you have more flexibility now
or less flexibility?
- In ways I have more.
To be frank, I don't have as many classes.
I'm able to parse up my day as I wish, and in a lot of ways,
a PhD is more like starting a small company
than anything else.
Your dissertation is novel, it's something new,
and so it's more like trying to make
an invention than it is maybe undergraduate classes
where you have a set curriculum to follow.
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- We are in entering six at UCLA.
It's the new Mechanical and Aerospace building,
and right now we're in my office.
- [Interviewer] Very cool, so tell me a little bit
about what you do in the office.
- This is the room where I can sit down
and get most of my work done,
and that involves writing my dissertation.
Last year was mostly studying for classes,
now it's studying for Russian, studying for my flying
and then also a majority of my time is really spent
just writing my book, my dissertation.
- Gotcha, so tell me a little about your program
and the dissertation particularly.
How does it sort of fold into everything else you're doing?
- Right, the Master, first students will get
their master's here, and that involves nine classes,
and then you take an additional three courses,
and that fulfills all the class requirements for the PhD,
but then the majority of that time really to get
your PhD is writing that dissertation which involves
novel research in your field so, for me,
aerospace engineering.
- I see.
So you studied aerospace as an undergrad.
Did you already have a lot of these requirements
fulfilled when you came in?
- I had great background in aerospace, no doubt,
but when you get into your master's or your PhD program
here at UCLA, since I went somewhere completely different,
I start fresh as far as those requirements
that UCLA's interested in.
- Okay, so what were those initial requirements
that you had to fulfill for the beginning
of the PhD for the master's?
- You take nine courses in your field
so for me, that's nine aerospace engineering classes
from dynamics to structures
to fluid mechanics to 3D printing.
And then, in the beginning,
at the end of your first year,
you take what's called the preliminary exam,
and it's a test, a two day test, qfour hours each day,
you sit down, and it essentially covers the gamut
of what aerospace engineering is,
and you need to pass this test.
- It sounds like a really stressful version of the SAT.
The SAT but we're also testing you on space engineering.
- Yeah, imagine some standardized test
but for rocket science.
- So you're saying it's literally rocket science.
- I'm fortunate enough to be able to say
something like that.
- [Interviewer] Amazing.
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- So, what is this?
- Right, this is our plasma gun, named it Hefty
and it has a
argon gas
that we can ionize
and turn into a plasma that is about
10 thousand degrees Fahrenheit,
and we can put that up against different materials
and see how the material fares.
- So let me get this straight.
So you take a chunk of whatever you're working on,
and you put it in that holder?
- [Dylan] Right in that holder
- An argon torse is what you're saying.
- [Dylan] Yeah
- Blasts out and destroys part of it.
So you're blasting stuff with a laser essentially.
- A plasma gun.
- Okay, I'm sorry.
A plasma gun and you're testing out how well it holds up.
- [Dylan] Exactly.
- You have a cool job.
You know?
- We're in an extreme environments lab.
What do you want?
- [Interviewer] Very neat.
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- Why did you choose to come to UCLA for the PhD program?
- I had a few opportunities at different schools
all over the country, and ultimately,
I came down to the lab I could join,
the adviser that could help me through the PhD process
as well as location.
Being right here in Los Angeles
where many aerospace companies are,
it makes it more feasible for me to be able
to collaborate with companies like JPL
or the aerospace corporations as we'll see later.
- In terms of the resource that you've been able
to work with while you've been here,
it sounds like you've been able to work with
a lot of different companies,
been able to work with state of the art
laboratory equipment.
You also recently, right, received funding from the NSF?
- I was fortunate enough in this past April
to find out that I was one of the recipients
for the NSF GRFP,
National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship Program,
And it's going to help me through the rest of the PhD
to be able to focus on my research
and also be able to show whenever I'm giving
a presentation or submitting a paper
that I'm backed by this amazing organization.
Astronaut wasn't my goal from day one.
I knew pretty early I wanted to work on rockets.
Like, rocket science definitely was appealing
from age five and fortunately through high school,
I found out that science and math was something I enjoyed
and was able to do at a high level and pulls me that led
to my first experiences at rocket companies
and I was like, okay this is for sure what I wanna work on.
The astronaut aspirations came a little bit later.
Once I worked at Cape Canaveral in Kennedy Space Center
out in Florida and even meet astronauts,
that's really what showed me that this might be
the career choice that actually I really wanna aspire to do.
But as far as for students who may not be sure,
take as many AP classes as you can.
Physics, chemistry, biology, calculus.
Make sure you can, you challenge yourself,
and know by the time you exit high school
whether this is something you a, enjoy at a high level,
and you can be successful at it.
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We are at AMI Sushi on Broxton Avenue
which is the main eatery and pretty much
the main happening place in Westwood right next to UCLA.
- It's beautiful out here.
- Yeah it's awesome and we have movie premiers
over there at the Fox Theater,
tons of different food options,
all different types of cultures and ethnic foods,
Japanese right now, there's Mediterranean just down
the street, and there's also Barney's Beanery
which is one of the main bars in town.
- Gotcha
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- Okay, so where are we now?
- We're at Santa Monica Airport
where I do my flight training.
- So why are you getting your pilot's license?
What's driving this?
- I've always wanted to fly, honestly.
How cool, when you're so little you think of flight
as a super hero power that you'd love to have,
and this is the closest thing you can do to doing that,
and it's a small step to be, you know,
fulfilling the dreams that I'm trying to fulfill.
- How often are you here?
- I come here twice a week for a few hours everyday,
we fly up to Malibu or we fly to the Valley,
we fly south and try different airports,
and eventually, I'll be able to fly on my own.
- That's cool. - Yeah.
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- Okay, so where are we now?
- We're at the Aerospace Corporation
which is where I do my experiments most of the time
for my PhD dissertation.
- So why do you come here to do your experiments
for your dissertation?
- UCLA's labs, as we saw, are fantastic,
but there are certain things that we don't have
that they have here.
And we have a nice comradery between UCLA
and the Aerospace Corporation.
We're very local and we've done a lot of projects together
and including this one where I do experiments
on what's called secondary electron emission,
and there's a big vacuum chamber that I use
in the facility right in here.
This is a hub for aerospace.
You have Northrop Grumman, you have Boeing,
you have Lockheed Martin, you have Raytheon.
We're right next to LAX, and so if you need shipments
in from the airport, you have that too.
- Right, and I guess you have the Air Force Base right here.
- Yeah exactly.
You have both government and private, commercial.
This is the place to be for aerospace.
- So this is why you came to LA for your PhD?
- Right.
I ultimately, what it came down to where I wanted to study,
having the companies that I would potentially work for
later on right here where I was studying
made the difference.
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- [Interviewer] Okay, so where are we now?
- We are at SpaceX headquarters
right here in Hawthorne, California.
We have the Falcon 9 rocket right behind me,
and this is our first landed vehicle for space,
and I had the pleasure of working for them for 14 weeks
this past summer, just finished up.
- So I'm sure there are elements of your job
that you can't describe to us,
but if you had to in broad term, what were you doing here?
- I was on the drag and propulsion team,
and that's the vehicle that the astronauts sit inside
en route to the International Space Station,
and I got to work on the propulsion system
doing structural and propulsion analysis on those vehicles.
- So the little piece that takes the astronauts from this
after it's used all its fuel up to the space station?
- Exactly.
It's the thing that sits on top, essentially.
- That's really cool.
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- Thank you for watching.
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