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_ ___Oakton Alumni shoots for the moon&). We had yet to figure this part out. We were essentially controlling it with an X-Box controller. As we were transporting this thing, it fell and got damaged.”
Faced with this challenge, the team’s ability to travel to Cape Canaveral to participate was in jeopardy.
“We were told: ‘We’re going to scrap the trip unless you can put a working robot in front of us on Monday.’ And that’s what we did. We literally went to my friend’s garage, worked night and day, and presented a working robot at 6:00 a.m. on Monday morning.”
Although the Team did not win the competition, it was a rewarding experience. The Track System that Memon had built from bicycle chains and two-by-fours was specifically complimented by NASA.
This hands-on learning experience fostered his aptitude for STEM. Faheem recalls his decision to pursue an engineering pre-major and the support of Oakton faculty.
“It was both of my physics professors Ted Gotis and George Tootelian who were really instrumental in that decision. Professor Gotis was one of the best teachers at Oakton. His style of teaching is so engaging, and he makes every class so fun. That’s what really drove me toward physics and mechanical engineering.”
When it came time to transfer for his bachelor’s at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC), he described working with Oakton’s advisors and the process “as a breeze. I might as well have been taking classes at UIC; I was so prepared.”
After working at Orbital and GE, in October 2022, Faheem was hired by Lockheed Martin to work as a contractor for NASA’s Orion Artemis Project, a mission that will land the first woman and the first person of color on the moon.
“Because I had my roots in the reliability field, I was able to understand how equipment fails and what are some of the telltale signs of those failures. My job is to look at literally every single component of the spacecraft. Figure out all the ways that it can fail. Assign probabilities to those failures and roll them up from a component level to system level, all the way to a mission success or failure level.
I went from a NASA college project to actual Artemis sending people to the moon.”
Reflecting back, Faheem shares some words of wisdom to the next generation of students finding their place at Oakton and beyond.
“What I realized throughout my career is you don’t know what you don’t know, right? And the only way to know what those things are is to talk to someone who’s more experienced than you, who can provide you insight on those things. So don’t be afraid to go out and talk to people. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, because most likely the wheel is there. You just have to go find it.”