By Amy D. Fienen
When Jasmine Sirvent began her journey at FPU, it was with the goal of becoming an engineer, but as so often happens during college, life took her on a different path—a path that included a NASA internship.
Sirvent is FPU’s first student to be selected for NASA’s Student Airborne Research Program (SARP). A senior planning to graduate in May 2025, she is double majoring in English and applied mathematics, and spending last summer in the competitive research fellowship solidified her goal of pursuing a career in mathematics.
A friend who’d participated in SARP encouraged Sirvent to apply, and she did so not expecting to get in. But in March 2024 she was accepted to the eight-week summer internship, an experience that gives students access to NASA’s flying space laboratories, allowing them to acquire hands-on research experience in a scientific campaign.
An Orange County native who moved to Fresno during her senior year of high school, Sirvent was assigned to the SARP East cohort, where she spent her first two weeks at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Each student is assigned to a research team that studies either terrestrial ecology, atmospheric science or ocean biology, which was Sirvent’s research area. Under the leadership of a faculty researcher and graduate student mentor, Sirvent studied coastal hyperspectral data to analyze kelp physiology.
“The internship was basically data analysis,” Sirvent says. “We were there to come up with ways to analyze the data.”
Sirvent studied hyperspectral data off the coast of Santa Barbara from a NASA plane used for studying and observing earth and space. She also collected data during trips to the Virginia Barrier Islands. Once the data was collected, students traveled to Christopher Newport University for the remainder of the summer, with day trips to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. There, they analyzed the data collected during the field portion of the program, using it to develop their own research projects.
One of Sirvent’s favorite aspects of the program was using coding to analyze data she’d collected, and it helped solidify her choice to pursue a career in math after college. “The success of the coding was so much fun,” she says. “The experience taught me that I would rather do math than science. It cemented that I really enjoy working with numbers and algorithms instead of scientific hypotheses.”
SARP Project Manager Stephanie Olaya says in an article on the NASA website that the program helps students grow not just as researchers, but in confidence as well. “You really see them become scientists in their own right,” she says. “A lot of these projects are at the graduate level; they are making important contributions in earth science research and applications. They don’t even realize the magnitude of the things they’ve accomplished until the end of the program.”
The program culminated with Sirvent and her fellow participants presenting their research projects at Langley Space Center using the data they’d collected and analyzed. Her research project was titled “Kelp Us! A Methods Analysis for Predicting Kelp Pigment Concentrations from Hyperspectral Reflectance.”
After graduation, Sirvent plans to attend graduate school to study numerical analysis. In the meantime, she’s going to make the most of the time she has left at FPU. She maintains a busy schedule tutoring math and English, working in the physics and chemistry labs and serving as editor-in-chief of The Green Light, FPU’s literary journal.
Professors, particularly Clinical Assistant Professor of Mathematics Jeremiah Ruesch, have helped Sirvent change her perspective on learning. “He helped me be creative and curious instead of just caring about my grades,” she says. “FPU helped me fall in love with math and learning things for fun, not just for the sake of learning it for my job.”
Thanks to those faculty, friends and a supportive family, Sirvent likes the person she’s become during her collegiate journey. “I like what my mind has become and how it’s changed,” she says. “The professors know me and care about me.”
PHOTO: Jasmine Sirvent presents as part of her NASA Student Airborne Research Program (SARP). (Image provided by NASA)