USD Magazine Summer 2021

An excitement for the un- known and a desire to learn con- tinued to define Gates’ focus as she contemplated the next phase of her life. In the winter of her junior/senior year, Gates began working in Colorado so she could pursue another passion — skiing. It was there that a ran- dom conversation opened up an unexpected opportunity. “One day, a guy came in and asked what I was doing. I said, ‘I’m applying for all these intern- ships.’ He asked me what my ma- jor was and I said ‘mechanical en- gineering.’ His dad used to work at INL and he told me they have a lot of internship opportunities, so I said, ‘OK, I’ll look into it.’” It was that chance encounter with a stranger that prompted Gates to apply for an internship with the laboratory, a position she ultimately received due to her machining education. “What really got me in the door at INL was having machin- ing experience, because a lot of engineers don’t have that oppor- tunity within their undergradu- ate education,” she says. For Gates, it’s clear “the stars aligned,” but little did she know that the internship would eventu- ally lead her to post-graduate em- ployment and the surface of Mars. After graduating from USD in 2016, Gates joined the INL team. For the past five years, she’s been part of the group responsible for assembling, testing and deliver- ing the rover generator. “Specifically on Perseverance, it’s a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator,” says Gates. “It’s the generator that fu- els the rover. The rover has lithi- um ion batteries to power it, and those are all charged by our nu- clear power generator.” Gates sees each day at work as a unique experience in the field she loves. “This might be the coolest job I’ll ever have,” she ad- mits. “One of the reasons I really

C O U R T E S Y O F A M A N D A G A T E ’ 1 6 ( B S / B A )

[ a l i g n m e n t ]

rom sunny San Diego to the windswept Martian land- scape, Amanda Gates ’16 F Planet s al ign for mechani cal engineer Amanda Gates D A R E M I G H T Y T H I N G S by Allyson Meyer ’16 (BA), ’21 (MBA)

generator she helped build touched down on the planet. A native of North Bend, Wash- ington, Gates’ quest for warmer weather and beaches led her to San Diego for college, where she immediately discovered a home away from home at the Universi- ty of San Diego’s Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering. As a work-study undergradu- ate student for the engineering school, Gates quickly immersed

herself in the program, taking advantage of the access to pro- fessors, the small class sizes and the ability to pursue hands-on learning opportunities in the school’s machine shop. “Just having hands-on experi- ence on how things are machined really makes us better engineers,” says Gates. “Knowing how the process works — since I’ve done it first-hand — helps me design something that is practical.”

(BS/BA) is charting her own path. A nuclear research engineer with the United States Department of Energy’s Idaho National Labora- tory (INL), Gates has literally seen her career soar. As the world watched the launch and landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars in the summer of 2020, Gates held her breath as the rover

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