By Bryson Carter

Greensboro College alumni Joshua Fitzgerald has become an important member of the Artemis II space mission team. Currently, he works as an astrodynamicist at NASA.

However, the path there was not an easy one.

Fitzgerald grew up in Burlington, N.C., where he was homeschooled by his mom. However, his learning experience was nothing close to normal. He began learning two grades ahead of what he should have been learning already, but when his mom was looking for curricula, she could only find high school material. Therefore, he was thrust into more advanced material incredibly quickly.

When he was done learning the high school material, the natural next step was college, but finding a college that would accept a 14-year-old was not going to be easy. Many of the colleges his mom called said that it was not a good idea and that they would not accept him.

Greensboro College, however, was willing to take that chance.

While at the college, Fitzgerald was a member of The Collegian and even wrote about the 2016 NASA Space Apps challenge that he was a part of with Dr. Somerlad-Rogers. The team from GC won Best Mission Concept and was invited to Cape Canaveral to watch an actual launch.

After graduating from GC at 17, he went on to get his master’s at Virginia Tech. The rest is history and history in the making. It is great to see Greensboro College alumni doing great things and changing the world for the better.