Published: May 26, 2023
Mr. Gibbs writes:
I want to share this email from Tommy Nuthmann with you not to toot my own horn, but because it is a wonderful testimony about impact NITARP had on him. Just for reference, Tommy [...] was one of the first students I took with me to NITARP back in 2011.
I recently found out you have retired! I wanted to shoot you an email and give you well earned congratulations on an amazing career where you made a difference to so many students at Glencoe, myself included. To this day, when people ask how I ended up in the space industry, I start the story by explaining that my interest in space was encouraged and enabled by my favorite high school teacher in my Physics and Astronomy classes! I am so grateful for the enthusiasm you brought and the extra effort you put in constantly to give both me and the rest of your students every opportunity to be inspired by the complexities (and beautiful simplicities) that explain the way everything in our world moves, acts, and reacts.
I will always treasure the time we spent during NITARP, and I will never forget sitting in the talk we attended at AAS on JWST's engineering and capabilities and thinking to myself, "wow I want to build THAT when I grow up!" I don't know that I have completely grown up, and I haven't worked on a space telescope (yet), but I have had the incredible opportunity to work on orbital transfer vehicles and communications satellites that most people will only ever look up and wonder about, and I think that it is pretty cool. [...] I hope you look back on your career with pride and satisfaction, because you really are an incredible teacher. Every student needs a mentor who helps them to focus their passion and pushes them to believe in themselves, and you were that mentor for me.