“People think I am, like, some valedictorian,” India Jackson said with a laugh on Wednesday. “No, I’m not. I am just driven and ambitious.”

This summer, Ms. Jackson, 32, is headed to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, where she will be an intern at NASA, researching solar flares and their effect on astronauts. But that’s not the most interesting part of the story.

She is a single mother who is getting her Ph.D. in physics at Georgia State University in Atlanta. And to cover the costs of travel and housing, a cousin, Dasha Fuller, set up a campaign on GoFundMe. Within 24 hours, the campaign reached its $8,000 goal (overshooting it a bit, actually, for a total of $8,510) and closed. Ms. Jackson said it would not be right to accept more than she needed.

“We choose to become scientists to make history,” she said. “Not money.”

So on May 30, Ms. Jackson and her 11-year-old daughter, Jewel Henry, will catch a plane to Houston in what the mathematician said she could describe only as a longtime dream. As a young woman growing up in Decatur, Ga., she first took to science in the ninth grade, when she applied to take classes at the Fernbank Science Center in Atlanta. There, she learned about astronomy and spent hours at the planetarium.