** Prompt: A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you. **
I began working on the Community College of Denver’s (CCD) balloon satellite project in the Fall of 2011. It was the first time that a student team from CCD would participate in one of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium’s (COSGC) main events: launching experiments on a high-altitude balloon satellite. Each participating school was given a budget of money and mass to build payloads that would be carried up to 100,000 feet into the atmosphere by a helium-latex balloon. Our first attempt was rushed, but we learned what to focus on in future experiments. Our next payload in the Spring of 2012 was a success; we collected viable scientific data, all of which would be useful in the next semest