Prepare for Take-Off
How’s this for hands-on training? A young attendee at the annual STEM Symposium practiced his hand at the defense contractor Vencore’s flight simulator station—with a former Naval F18 Top Gun pilot along for the ride. Before becoming a director with Vencore’s Space Group, Eric Schierling (pictured), enjoyed a 13-year military career, cataloguing more than 2,000 hours, and nearly 400 carrier landings, during combat operations in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. This year, Schierling was joined by colleague Mike Matthews, also a director at Vencore Space, who participated in a panel discussion of emerging STEM fields.