The Burlington area teems with innovative companies, and right now, one of the most innovative is Beta Technologies, which is designing revolutionary new aircraft. Now, Shauna Kimura ‘22, has taken off in her role as a software intern at Beta, which began in December 2020 after three consecutive interviews and a coding challenge. “Every day at Beta is exciting,” says Shauna, who’s been able to flight-test with the scale models team and even learned to fly an EVTOL aircraft in the flight simulator. The most challenging part, she says, has been learning about aviation and electric-powered vehicles from the ground up, so to speak.
 

Working with fellow interns, engineers and pilots, Shauna has developed such software tools as an interactive dashboard to view statistics on runtime for flight-test hardware parts. “It’s rewarding to witness Beta’s accomplishments on a daily basis,” she says, “and realize that I am making a small contribution to their success and a more sustainable future. Being able to apply the skills I have learned at UVM to the technology industry has given me a completely new perspective.”
 

“Shauna joined the team with a strong ability to communicate, learn and execute,” says Beta Technologies team member Chris Woodall. “I was able to give her a task that was completely new to her. She not only completed the project, but took ownership of the project and was able to provide some additional analysis that was previously tedious to do in a way that was user friendly and extensible. She even took it on herself to figure out what was incorrect about the data we were collecting so that we could improve the quality of our results and analysis going forward.”