When Cherish Prickett talks about space, she sees ways of helping others reach the stars.

“I remember seeing the program ‘Evacuate Earth’ on the National Geographic Channel,” Prickett recalls. “They designed a spacecraft to evacuate our planet and needed to get ship parts from all over the world and put them together to work as one system. I love puzzles, and this is one puzzle I would love to solve to get humans to safety.”

The Georgia Perimeter College engineering student will get one step closer to that goal when she travels to La Serena, Chile, in January to participate in an international research project working at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.

Prickett is the first GPC student and the only two-year college student to be accepted into the international program. She’ll spend ten weeks in Chile, doing research and working with several large telescopes at the observatory examining the “stardust of the galaxy.”

“I’m interested in finding out more about exoplanets outside our known solar system,” Prickett says. “Those are planets that orbit different suns.”

For the past two years, Prickett has been a participant in GPC’s National Science Foundation-funded Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program—otherwise known as STEP.

A former liberal arts major, she became interested in engineering while working as a nanny for a family with two engineers. The Parkview High School graduate has “always been good in math and science,” she says. 

“I expected to go to Georgia Tech, but first I needed to save money, so I came to GPC,” she says.  She was accepted into GPC’s Regents Engineering Transfer Program, which guarantees acceptance into Tech upon completion of certain courses and at least a 2.8 GPA.

“I came into engineering not knowing what exactly what I wanted to do,” she says.

The STEP program opened doors in research for her. Last summer, she worked in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

“The STEP provides three different ways for undergraduates to participate in research,” says Dr. Pamela Leggett-Robinson, GPC’s lead coordinator of the program. “The first is a three-week research program held in May at GPC; the second, an eight-week program at a research institution; and the last opportunity is an undergraduate research experience which can be outside the state.”

Prickett says the research opportunities offered through STEP have been helpful in identifying her strengths.  She has found that the area of industrial and systems engineering fits her personality. “I love putting together puzzles: fitting together different things to form a whole picture,” she says. 

Prickett is on track to graduate from GPC in May, and she may be looking at other engineering schools as well as Georgia Tech.

Until then, she says her next step before leaving for South America is practicing her Spanish.  “I have three years of Spanish in high school—and one year at GPC. I am really excited to be able to use it more and become more fluent while I’m in Chile,” she says.