Megan Wood: Connecting with classrooms across the globe
Student Megan Wood couldn’t afford to travel abroad to learn about education systems in other countries, so she did the next best thing – she brought the world to her. In the past year, the elementary education major from Lebanon, Mo., has developed relationships with teachers and their classes in 10 countries. 
Last spring, Wood began exploring pen pal websites for teachers. Although she won’t graduate until this December, she was accepted onto a site and began a relationship with a teacher in Poland who taught English to ninth-graders. Wood recruited her mother’s seventh-grade class at Joel E. Barber C-5 School in Lebanon, Missouri and the two classrooms worked around the eight-hour time difference and connected across the globe via Skype last May.
“It took them awhile to warm up, but then someone brought up video games, and it was all good after that,” Wood says with a smile. “It was a really cool experience.”
Although they planned on about a 30-minute conversation, the two classes actually visited about 90 minutes. They conversed a second time last spring and continued the conversation this past fall.
Wood believes it’s been a great experience for the classes on both continents. “They (the Missouri students) realized there are people out there like them; they just speak a different language. And the foreign students get to see what it’s like in the U.S. and practice the English language.”
Over the summer, Wood posted a PowerPoint introducing herself on the website and asked if any teachers would be interested if she made a “Day in the Life of an American College Student” video. The response was immediate. She got affirmative replies from Poland, Indonesia, Italy, Ghana, Turkey, Spain and Brazil, so she worked with Missouri Western cinema students to create it last fall. She also received letters from students in students in the 10 countries and is continuing to correspond with them. She recently received a video from Russian students who appreciated the opportunity to hone their English-speaking skills.
“I just thought it would be cool to communicate with a class in another country,” Wood says. “I never expected it to grow to anything like this.”
She was selected to present her project at a national honors conference last month.
Brad Douglas: Interning at the Goddard Space Flight Center
As Brad Douglas plans his career, his eyes are on the sky. Since last spring, the Missouri Western student has been working as an intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The St. Joseph native is working on a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a management emphasis and has been continuing his education at Missouri Western with online courses since he started the internship.
Douglas said he found the opportunity on NASA’s website and applied for the opening in March 2014. Two phone interviews and one Skype interview later, he landed the internship and started there last May. He is part of the NASA’s Pathways Intern Employment Program, which Douglas hopes will lead to a full-time position after graduation.
According to its website, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center builds spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study Earth, the sun, the solar system and the universe. Douglas says he loves working at the complex where employees are building the successor to the Hubble telescope.
“It’s cool to be in this environment. There are a lot of smart people,” he said.