Awakened California doctoral student goes viral online after refusing to a coveted NASA internship for “year.”
Daniela Lucas, a 26-year-old bioengineering student at UC San Diego, recently uploaded a Tiktok video showing her dramatic selection of “decay offer” for her internship in NASA’s Human Health and Performance program.
“No one will tell you how difficult it is to reject an offer from a dream internship at NASA due to the current administration,” wrote the 26-year-old Lucas in the video.
“I worked for years to receive this letter, I just have to decline,” she added, including a crying face and a demon emoji.
The crying piano music was played on video as Lucas clenched her face and shook her head and looked incredible.
Lucas – grew up in Venezuela and moved to Florida in 2015 with his father and family, winning a full ride at Miami-Dade College, according to UCSD Bio.
Her video has been reposted by numerous accounts across social media. This is a response from mistrust and ock lol to help Lucas stick to her beliefs.
“I feel like NASA avoided the asteroid there,” one commenter wrote in X.
“I support her decision as the best outcome for NASA,” another said.
“This must be fake. No one applies. He’s smart enough to offer an internship at NASA just to refuse,” the third wrote. “But if that’s true, she certainly showed them!”
Others were by Lucas’s side – and President Trump said he could learn from her.
“You can oppose her reasons, but she’s stuck to it. Our so-called conservative politicians need to be careful, and this is what sticks to the causes,” one person wrote.
“It’s good for her to stick to her beliefs. At least she’s committed, unlike the politicians at GOP,” another said.
NASA Internships were recently ranked as the most prestigious single program in all fields by internship resource vault.com. They beat Google, Apple, Goldman Sachs, CIA, SpaceX, BlackRock and more.
According to NASA, the intern became an astronaut and astronomer, discovering planets outside the solar system and began a lifelong career with space agencies.
Trump was generally a friend of NASA.
He increased NASA funds by 10% to $22.63 billion by the end of his first term. According to Time Magazineand for a long time, it has been frankly said about sending humans back to the moon. That’s directly involved in Lucas’ internship department.
NASA currently has plans to get the moon back on track for Americans in the spring of 2026. As part of a plan to walk the moon again soon after. And in his inauguration speech, Trump announced his plan to “pursuing the fate of our manifesto on the planet,” landing humans on Mars.
However, NASA recently fell to the intersection of the administration’s plans to cut federal spending in April. Report from ARS Technica Trump revealed that he intended to cut NASA’s budget by 20% in 2026.
It’s what’s called “nasty” by Trump’s pioneer in space exploration, Elon Musk (who is working to cut federal spending) Statement to Politico.
The federal agency also falls within Trump’s agenda that removes the government’s space for the DEI policy, where former President Biden concentrates $20 million to expand at NASA.
Neither Lucas nor NASA responded to requests for comment.
