Amanda Cordes

2015 SMART scholar, Amanda Cordes, completed her service commitment with her sponsoring facility, the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NACWD) – China Lake – China Lake, California. Amanda’s time as an intern leading to her first year of employment with NACWD has provided her with variety of opportunities. While a first-year employee performs three to five rotational tours, Amanda was able to work in seven to eight different branches because of the SMART internship at her facility. “My internships”, explains Amanda, “gave me the opportunity to work in fields I never would have normally considered with my degree (flight test, software engineering, energetics development). This allowed me to increase and diversify my skill set, build and expand my network of connections, and really find a job I loved and a place where I fit.” As a materials engineer, Amanda handles any material-related issues that develop in the weapons division. Each day is a new project, and each project presents its own unique problem. Some of her projects include corrosion prevention, coatings and paints, drawing updates and specification changes, new material selection or replacement, polymer composite and additive manufacturing part research, non-destructive inspection, mechanical property testing and characterization, metallurgy and microstructure inspection, and failure analysis. These tasks do not deter her, but rather, motivate the engineer. In her current role, “the failure analyses are my favorite aspect of my work. Every investigation that comes in is like a unique puzzle that needs to be solved. No two investigations are ever the same and each provides a new challenge to analyze, understand, and learn from.” When Amanda is not analyzing material-related issues, she can be found traveling to U.S. National Parks, photographing landscapes while hiking and camping.