If Courtney Baker ’27 could advise any busy first-year college student on one thing—it might be this: Join a club.
The sophomore mechanical engineering major was recently awarded a 2025 Patti Grace Smith Fellowship. The national award provides exceptional Black students with paid work experience in the aerospace industry, mentorship, and support through a community of similarly driven peers. The process is rigorous with an essay-based application followed by rounds of interviews—fewer than 50 fellows are chosen each year.
Baker believes the time she spent as a member of the Lehigh University Space Initiative (LUSI) helped her stand out in a highly competitive field of applicants.
“I would say that club is one of the main reasons I got the fellowship,” she says. “It opened so many doors for me.”
As a Patti Grace Smith Fellow, Baker will spend the summer in Denver interning for Astroscale, a Japanese-based company that develops solutions for outer-space debris removal and services satellites to promote a sustainable space environment. As a member of LUSI, Baker had worked on the team vying for a spot in NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, an effort that gives civilian groups the opportunity to conduct investigations and technology demonstrations in space.
Baker’s team had designed a small satellite that could track garbage patches in the ocean and send that data to groups monitoring and addressing pollution. Although the team didn’t get the green light from NASA, Baker acquired a valuable set of skills and experiences she could draw on during her interviews for the fellowship.
“I talked about some of my technical expertise and the work I did writing the proposal for the ground station, which is what communicates with the satellite, and why I found it so interesting,” she says. “I was also able to talk about my work ethic, because it’s a lot to juggle class and commitment to a club like LUSI. But I think what really sold them was my passion for space and sustainability.”
In high school, Baker founded an environmental club, and now serves as vice president of the Lehigh Renewable Energy Club (REC), which is developing a project to implement solar panels in easily accessible locations on campus for student use, and will host a table at Lehigh’s annual Energy Systems Engineering Earth Day Celebration.
“I’m excited to see how these sustainability project experiences will merge into my internship,” she says.
In addition to her full-time, paid internship this summer, Baker will also be paired with two mentors (a fellowship alum and an industry professional), attend monthly virtual meetings with her cohort, and take part in a July summit with the entire group in Washington, D.C. She’s looking forward to everything she’ll learn—and building relationships with the people she’ll be learning from.
“I’ve been in a lot of clubs, but that’s obviously not industry experience,” says Baker, who expects to be working in some aspect of spacecraft design and operation while at Astroscale. “I’m looking forward to gaining practical experience, but I’m also excited to meet new people and expand my network. There aren’t a lot of Black people in the aerospace industry, and so having the opportunity to be around people that support me in that way is going to be fantastic.”
Baker first became interested in space during elementary school. There was something about the covers of the astronomy books featured in a library display that caught her attention. She’d check them out, bring them home, and fill a notebook with what she was learning. Pretty soon, she got hooked on the Star Wars franchise. And then, as a sophomore in high school, a creative writing project had her envisioning human settlements in space.
“That’s when I was like, wait, it would be really cool if I could help make that a reality through my career somehow,” she says.
Baker was drawn to Lehigh in large part because of its range of aerospace clubs. That, and the fact that the university’s resident astronaut, mechanical engineering and mechanics professor Terry Hart ’68, advises many of the groups. There weren’t many other schools that could boast that kind of power duo. She reached out to members of the clubs before she even “touched down” on campus, and ultimately, ended up joining the Lehigh Aerospace Club (Lehigh Aero) and the Lehigh University Rocketry Association in addition to LUSI.
Looking to the future, she’s not yet sure what path she’ll follow when she graduates in a couple of years. Maybe she’ll continue on for her master’s degree or go into industry. It’s still early days. But this summer will be a big help in giving her a glimpse of what’s expected in the profession.
Ultimately, she’d like to work at the intersection of space and sustainability. And though her classes have ramped up, curtailing her club involvement somewhat, she’s quick to suggest that new students take full advantage of what Lehigh has to offer.
“Use your first semester to explore the different clubs, get involved with one, and then put it on your resume,” she says.
You never know where it could lead.
—Story by Christine Fennessy
