This page describes select experiences and projects that I have worked and been involved with.
For more details and visuals, please visit my LinkedIn or contact me to hear more!
This website, tristanforks.com, was created to market myself and my brand as more than just my schooling and knowledge. I wanted to create an information center where anyone can go to learn more about me, my passions, and everything that I do. While I had no previous experience in web design, HTML, or CSS, creating a website represented a new challenge for me, something that I never back away from. This project has taught me a lot about solving problems, making steady progress, and pushing through to see a final result.
Das Greenhaus is a business incubator located in Boerne, Texas that helps small companies and startups grow. My work at Das Greenhaus included conducting interviews with entrepreneurs and leaders in the aerospace industry and wrirting a weekly newsletter covering their stories. I also sat in on mentorship meetings, helping to identify issues and problems in startups and brainstorm potential solutions. My time at Das Greenhaus had a lot of overall benefits, and it helped me to expand my network while also giving me the idea to build this website!
During my time in the Aggie Research Program, I did research with doctorates in the Texas A&M Department of Geophysics analyzing Martian rocks from scans preformed by the PIXL intstrument on Perseverance. I wrote multiple python scripts to calculate the detection angles of the various surfaces on Martian rocks based on data recieved by the PIXL instrument and then display 2D heatmaps visualizing the context of the data. I also read, summarized, and presented multiple white papers to the team of engineers and physicists to help keep them up to date on developments in the field.
During my freshman year at Texas A&M, I served as the project manager for my team in a national NASA RASC-AL design competition. My team of 22 designed and developed a rover that would embark on a year long mission to the southside of the Moon in order to survey and search for water and ice samples. As project manager, I helped to organize the team into compatible subteams, scheduled and ran team meetings, and served as a point of contact between the team and the compeition coordinators.
During my time in the NASA High School Aerospace Scholars program I went through self paced learning modules on various topics covering space exploration. At the end of these learning modules, I was placed on a team with 10 students where we were tasked with designing and modeling a Lunar orbiter. After being elected systems engineer by my fellow teammates, I worked with other teams to ensure design compatibility and mission success. At the end of the design challenge, my team and I developed a final product review that was presented to a team of NASA Engineers and scored in the top 3 of competing teams.