Sky's the limit for Future Leader winner pursuing aerospace engineering in Colorado
CBS Colorado is partnered with Chevron and Colorado School of Mines to highlight high school students who are excelling in STEM. The Future Leaders award is given to six students throughout the school year and comes with $1,000.
The current winner is Caleb Woldemichael is a senior at DSST Montview High School in Denver. Woldemichael is one of the leaders/mentors for a student-led extracurricular that builds CubeSats.
"A CubeSat is a 10X10X10 centimeter cube that is sent into the atmosphere to collect data," Woldemichael explained.
The members of the CubeSat Project at DSST Montview design and build the tiny satellites.
"It's a lot of trial and error, but you spend hours just modeling a 3D version of all the parts and components," Woldemichael told CBS News Colorado's Chief Meteorologist Dave Aguilera.
Woldemichael was on the computer-aided design (CAD) team in his junior year. The team built a CubeSat and launched it from a weather balloon 100,000 feet in the stratosphere.
"We code it to actually collect data," he said.
The team tracked the CubeSat in real time.
"It was up in the air for about an hour," Woldemichael said.
Then they retrieved it about 30 miles away in a farm field.
"Even though we have those components from last year, we're building a whole new satellite – that's stronger, more dense, and more technologically advanced," he explained.
"Ok Caleb, tell me what you've learned from this project?" Aguilera asked.
"I learned what to do with failure and how to find growth in failure," Woldemichael responded.
The CubeSat Project builds skills in CAD, coding and 3D printing, but Woldemichael has also become an experienced problem solver, and practiced soft skills, like teamwork and communications.
"The opportunities are really endless in what we can do," he said.
LINK: Future Leaders Award
If you know a high school student who excels in STEM, you can nominate them for the Future Leaders Award.