“Don’t Clip Your Wings”: Destiny Howell’s Path From Hunter College to Rocket Research

Destiny Howell is spending this summer getting a NASA-funded sounding rocket ready for launch.

From June through August, the physics PhD student will help calibrate and safety-check a scientific instrument for the rocket mission before it is shipped overseas for a winter launch in Norway. A few years ago, that future would have been hard to imagine.

Destiny was the first in her family to go to college, and the first among her friends to step into that world. In many ways, she was navigating it on her own: choosing a CUNY campus, figuring out FAFSA and TAP, and learning the systems no one around her had gone through before.

Her mother could not walk her through college from experience, but she had always paid attention to what lit Destiny up. As a child, Destiny loved science, reading about marine biology, animals, meteorology, and space. Her mother found outside programs that kept that curiosity alive.

She also pushed Destiny to stay open. In high school, when Destiny hesitated before accepting a business internship outside her STEM path, her mother told her not to limit herself.

“Don’t clip your wings,” she said.

At Hunter, that advice became less of a saying and more of a practice. Destiny was still committed to physics, but she was learning to look around it too: at the people who could help her, the rooms she could enter, and the paths that might sit just outside what she already knew.

Beacon High School, where Destiny studied, focused heavily on the performing arts. When Destiny entered Hunter’s physics program, the gap showed up quickly. She loved science and knew she wanted to study physics, but the math-heavy coursework demanded preparation she was still building. Calculus became one of the first places where she needed support.

During the pandemic, while trying to keep up and figure out college as a first-generation student, she found The City Tutors and connected with a calculus tutor. The tutoring gave her steadier footing as she worked through the math demands of her physics major. Her tutor also showed her that The City Tutors offered more than help in one class: there were mentors she could meet, too.

That introduction led her to Wei, a data scientist who became one of the first professionals she could ask about college, career paths, coding, and how to move through unfamiliar systems.

“I looked up to her as someone for guidance,” Destiny said. “How to navigate undergrad.”

The mentorship was simple and relatively short: a few conversations, often around thirty minutes. The impact stayed with her. Wei was kind, accessible, and willing to share how she had moved through her own path.

Wei entered at a moment when Destiny was still learning how much of college happened outside the classroom. Their conversations covered undergraduate life, career paths, data science, coding, and the kinds of opportunities that could help her grow alongside physics. For Destiny, it offered something she had been looking for: guidance from someone farther along who could help the next steps feel easier to see.

At Hunter, Destiny applied to AstroCom NYC, an astrophysics mentorship and research program. She earned a spot in the program as a freshman, a milestone typically reserved for older students. Through AstroCom NYC, she began research at the Flatiron Institute, studying black holes with scientists who became some of her most important mentors.

Those mentors encouraged her to branch out. Instead of staying in one lab environment throughout college, Destiny began pursuing opportunities in different places and disciplines.

That path led her to UT Austin, where she completed an observing run at the McDonald Observatory and helped operate its telescope. Later, she worked on a physics hardware project at Stony Brook University, building a scientific instrument, specifically a Near Infrared spectrometer. Each experience widened her understanding of what physics could look like: research, coding, instrumentation, astronomy, engineering, and now space mission work.

The same instinct that led Destiny into physics also made her curious about rooms beyond it.

At Hunter, she was learning the formal language of science: calculus, coding, research, instrumentation. Through The City Tutors, she was learning another language too: how to meet people, ask questions, and stay open to paths she could not yet see.

After Wei, Destiny kept finding her way back to The City Tutors through events.

Up to that point, most of her world had been shaped by physics classrooms, research labs, and the pressure of keeping up academically. The events opened a different dimension of college life. They exposed her to people whose careers had unfolded in nonlinear ways, people who moved across industries, carried different kinds of confidence, and understood professional life as something built over time.

For a first-generation student, that exposure carried its own kind of education. Destiny was beginning to understand that success was not only about grades or technical skill. It also involved relationships, curiosity, adaptability, and the willingness to enter unfamiliar rooms before feeling fully ready for them.

At PwC and Goldman Sachs, she listened to professionals talk about the turns their careers had taken, the decisions that changed their direction, and the uncertainty that often existed underneath polished resumes. The conversations reinforced something her mother had been telling her for years: a path does not always reveal itself all at once.

One Goldman Sachs event stayed with her in particular. David Solomon, the firm’s CEO, came to speak with students during a moment of intense pressure in the financial world. Destiny remembered how unusual it felt that someone operating at that level would still make time to sit with CUNY students and answer questions. For her, the experience compressed distance. The people running major institutions became people she could actually encounter, listen to, and learn from.

The Mets outings and social gatherings added something different. Away from conference rooms and panels, Destiny could talk with mentors and other CUNY students as people. Networking began to feel less like a task and more like a community she could enter.

“I always knew networking was so important,” she said. “You just never know where you end up.”

One event, in particular, stayed with her: a panel featuring astronaut Charlie Camarda, who spoke about applying to NASA twelve times before finally being accepted.

Destiny had struggled with impostor syndrome since her first year at Hunter. Even now, as a PhD student, she sometimes questions whether she belongs in the field. Hearing an astronaut speak openly about rejection shifted something in her understanding of success.

“If he could do it, despite the odds, despite people telling him no, why should I let other people tell me what I can do?” she said. “You don’t have to be Einstein to do science.”

For Destiny, The City Tutors became a place where exploration felt encouraged. The program exposed her to people, industries, and conversations far outside the world of physics while she was still forming her identity as a scientist.

She eventually applied to physics PhD programs and was accepted on her first try. She chose the University of Texas at San Antonio for research perfectly aligned with her goals: space physics, satellite data analysis, and space mission instrumentation.

Texas has brought its own challenges. Destiny misses New York deeply. She misses the energy of the city, the familiarity of home, and the community she found through The City Tutors. Still, the lessons stayed with her: keep networking, keep exploring, keep putting yourself in rooms where new possibilities can appear.

“I would say it was refreshing,” Destiny said of The City Tutors. “Meeting people from different fields, different career paths, how they think. I really liked the community.”

Now, as she prepares for an international rocket launch, Destiny is still carrying that advice forward.

Don’t clip your wings.

For Destiny Howell, those words helped turn uncertainty into motion.