“I can do this”: Kaleigh Sloop ’27 turns a childhood dream into a career path

Long before biochemistry major Kaleigh Sloop ’27 helped build rockets, she launched them in her imagination. Growing up with two parents working full-time, Sloop spent hours entertaining herself by playing astronaut. As she grew older, space exploration began to seem less like a career and more like childhood make-believe she was supposed to leave behind.

“I originally chose biochemistry because I planned to go to medical school,” Sloop said. “After shadowing health professionals, I realized I didn’t want to work directly in patient care; I wanted to be in the lab. Working in space exploration had been my childhood dream, but I thought, ‘It’s just a dream. I should let it go.’”

At Lenoir-Rhyne, Sloop began finding reasons to reconsider. She joined the AeroBears, LR’s competitive rocketry team. Through international competitions, Sloop and her team have launched alongside students from major engineering programs and met professionals throughout the aerospace industry. She has also watched fellow AeroBears turn their undergraduate experiences into internships, scholarships and funded graduate study.

“With the rocket team, we sometimes arrive at competitions already imagining how people from larger schools are going to see us,” Sloop said. “We work hard to prove those assumptions wrong. Then we get there and realize we’re not behind at all. Sometimes we’re the ones setting the bar.”

Those experiences helped make a career connected to space exploration feel less distant. After discovering L’SPACE — a NASA-funded virtual program designed to prepare college students for the space workforce — Sloop applied to its NASA Proposal Writing and Evaluation Experience.

Working with students from across the country, Sloop’s team is developing an original research proposal addressing a problem identified by NASA. The work requires participants to study existing research, generate ideas, collaborate remotely and eventually develop a proposal with guidance from a professional mentor.  

“My goal is to make connections with NASA researchers working in fields that interest me,” Sloop said. “I hope I can build those relationships, find a professional mentor and eventually turn those connections into an internship or another opportunity to work with NASA.”

At first, Sloop wondered how her preparation compared with students from larger institutions. At LR, original research is built into the undergraduate science curriculum, requiring students to engage with scientific literature, develop research questions, and design and conduct their own experiments. Sloop’s senior research project examines how chemical compounds affect the solubility of ibuprofen. The same skills — reading scientific literature, asking research questions and developing experiments — now inform her work with L’SPACE.  

“I have to remind myself, ‘I can do this,’” she said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m behind, but really, I’m right where the other students on my team are. When we compared our idea trackers, I had written down 10 ideas, and everyone else had about two or three.”

With her senior research continuing through the academic year and the possibility of advancing to the next phase of L’SPACE, Sloop is considering graduate programs in biochemistry, chemistry and pharmaceutical science, fields she once might not have connected with space exploration. Today, she sees possibilities in research involving human health and performance during spaceflight — work that could unite the scientist she has become with the astronaut she once imagined becoming.

“I think there’s something special about holding on to your childhood dream,” Sloop said. “I remember playing astronaut when I was little. As you grow up, it’s easy to think, ‘I could never do that. It was just a childhood dream.’ But sometimes the things we run from are exactly where we need to be.”