Oooof, high school. We remember those days. Why don't you make it more bearable by working on rockets and satellites with us? And yes, you can totally work with us. There's a lot to know and consider, however:

• You must be 16 or older. You can be younger, but you have to bring your guardian with you, which is usually hard to coordinate.

• You determine what you work on, not us. We'll help as much as we can, but this needs to be self directed by you. You'll get started by just hanging around, going to meetings, doing some onboarding, but then you get to decide what projects interest you the most and then work on those. We're literally not going to tell you what to do. It helps if you come in with at least a domain of interest, like electrical, computer science, mechanical, math, or management.

• We work in the PSU Engineering Building in downtown Portland. You'll have to get yourself here, park on the street or in a parking lot, and then coordinate with us to get in the building and the rocket room. You can always be remote (we're always hybrid, on Zoom and in person), but we encourage you to come in and get your hands dirty. If you stick around long enough, we'll get you  a card key so you can badge in.

• Be prepared to be overwhelmed! We're going to treat you like all of our other students, so be ready to hit a brick wall of learning. This stuff is hard, everyone is overwhelmed, and no one knows what we're doing... which is, of course, half the fun! You'll get to work directly on rocket and satellites, which is pretty great.

• Finally, you need to sign our new member agreement (email aerospace+join@pdx.edu to get an autoresponder with the link). VERY CAREFULLY read the code of conduct: we wrote that carefully, and we try our best to be inclusive, kind, and supportive. We'll expect that from you, too.

• How do you get started? Just start showing up. Come to our Tuesday evening Zoom meetings, start showing up at sub-team meetings on the project you're interested in, and in general, just weasel your way in. We'd love to have you.

We'd love to have your highly motivated high schooler work with us! But, you should know some extremely important things before you give them permission to work with us:

• Students must be 16 years or older. If they are younger, a parent or guardian must accompany them at all times to work with us.

• Your student will be treated as an adult and will be working with adults. PSAS is an extremely welcoming and inclusive group. We're mostly adults ranging from 18 year old 1st year students, to our awesome transfer and post-bac students who are in their 20s and 30s. Our industry advisors range from 20s to 70s. So just like in the industry, your students will be dealing with teams of a very large age range. We'll treat your high school student no differently. This is usually a great experience for them, but can be overwhelming for quieter students.

• We will not monitor your student. PSAS is a serious, focused, and extremely hard interdisciplinary engineering project in a university setting. PSAS is not a summer camp or after school program. Nobody will be monitoring or taking care of our student. PSU faculty, staff, and students will be treating your high schooler as just another PSAS volunteer. Your student must monitor and take care of themselves.

• It might not work out. Some students just aren't ready for this collegiate environment. It can be overwhelming and anxiety-producing. If it doesn't seem like it's working out, we'll ask your student very nicely to reconsider working with us.

• Your student will need to have high levels of motivation, self-direction, and executive functioning. We're trying to teach undergraduates how to do extremely hard engineering projects that even our faculty and staff don't know how to do. We'll try to include your student,  but they're going to have to climb the learning curve themselves just like our regular students. Your students are pretty darn impressive, and we've had some awesome students really contribute to our projects, but it's important for you to know that your student must be self motivated, self directed, and be able to learn by themselves.

• We must have a permission from you. We need to have explicit permission for your student to work with us. Please email aerospace@pdx.edu with your permission. Please include your contact information.