CONTACT: Virginia Stuart
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WEB SITE: UNH Small Satellite Lab
FROM ROCK BOTTOM TO ROCKET SCIENCE: UNH'S "COMEBACK KID" WINS NATIONAL GOLDWATER SCHOLARSHIP
DURHAM--In sixth grade, Eric Esposito loved space so much that he told his science teacher, "I want to get off this planet as soon as possible!" The University of New Hampshire senior--winner of a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship--is now content to stay on earth. "But a little bit of me is going into space," he says.Actually, what's going up is his computer code. Esposito leads the team of students who are programming the spacecraft computer for CATSAT, a student-designed satellite due to be launched by NASA in 2001. "He's the cornerstone of our flight software," notes David Forrest, director of the Small Satellite Laboratory at UNH. "He has taken over responsibilities normally only given to graduate students."
Esposito's career seems poised for liftoff as well. "His future is unlimited," says Forrest. Esposito was one of only four computer science students across the country this year to win a Goldwater Scholarship. The $7500 scholarship, honoring the late Senator Barry M. Goldwater, is the premier undergraduate award of its type in the fields of mathematics, science, and engineering.
But Esposito's future did not always looks so bright. He got off to a good start in high school, ranking first out of 600 freshmen at Manchester Central High School. It was during his junior year that things started to fall apart. His parents got divorced, and he started working long hours to help with household expenses, sometimes getting home from work at 11:30 p.m. The result was that he went to school but did virtually no work outside of class.
By the end of his senior year, Esposito was getting D's and F's. He had neither the money nor the grades to go to college. Rejected by UNH, he took a retail sales job.
Fortunately, he did have some skills. He and a friend had taught themselves how to program computers during the summer after their freshman year in high school. He eventually got a series of jobs at small software companies, but soon tired of "not knowing if you're going to get paid."
Before he knew it, four years had passed and he was sitting at a close friend's graduation ceremony at UNH. That roll call was like a wake up call for Esposito, and he realized he needed to go back to school. He started with a calculus class at UNH-Manchester. "When I walked into that class," he recalls, "I was more nervous than the first time I went on an airplane." He did well, but still lacked money for going to college full time.
Meanwhile, Esposito's friend, now a graduate student working on CATSAT, introduced him to Forrest. Forrest, who had done a four-year stint in the Navy before going to college himself, liked the "professionalism" he'd seen in older students. He gave Esposito a financial foot in the door to the university by offering him a job. Esposito began by working nearly full time on CATSAT and taking a couple of computer science courses.
The first in his family to go to college, Esposito will have a wide array of opportunities open to him when he graduates. For the summer, he is in Lyon, France, doing research on "parallel computing," a technique that allows computers to make very high speed calculations by linking together a number of computers (or just their processing units).
"If I enjoy doing that kind of pure research," he says, "I'll investigate grad school." If not, he'll be ready for a job in industry, prepared in part by his work on CATSAT. "Working at CATSAT is very different from class work," he says. "It's a totally different thought pattern," with lots of emphasis on "debugging" and problem solving.
But the rewards of space-related work go beyond gaining new skills. "CATSAT could help scientists understand the origin of universe," Esposito explains. "I like knowing that what we're working on could help answer questions people have been asking since we've had conscious thought."