Research and Internships

Quite a few people have been asking me questions about summer programs and research internships, so I thought I’d share my experiences.

Last summer, I worked in a Materials Science lab at UC Berkeley, for a nanoscience program called SHARP. What I actually did ranged from grunt lab work (preparing chip samples, wiring up chips) to computer programming to some real physics.

It wasn’t a residential program, but I found a place to live in Berkeley for a month anyway. There were twelve students; we’d gather in the morning around 8am, work in the lab from around 10am to 5pm, and go home afterwards. We also had several field trips, some catered lunches, and time for sports, but since participants commuted from as far away as San Jose, the program left me with a lot of free time. That made it a lot more fun than I had expected, since my high school always has lots of people at Berkeley every summer and my roommates played Starcraft most weekdays, so I had a lot of things I could do.

It was also a great experience because I learned a lot about working in a lab. If I had just joined up with a lab as an intern, I might have ended up doing a lot of rote work and learning less about the theory behind my lab work. The SHARP mentors were also great at explaining things, and I learned a lot about not just materials science but also about research, and I thought I’d share.

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First of all, I learned that there’s a lot of variety as to what programs teach and how they are run. Biology, medicine, and materials science are particularly popular, and there are a lot of math programs. But there are also a lot of interesting fields that don’t offer much in the way of programs but do have good opportunities, like AI and computer science.¹

If you’re looking for a field that interests you, you can search Wikipedia or find an abstract book for, say, the Intel Science Talent Search. You can also look up interesting projects that you’d like to work on online, even on a blog like Engadget. Then you can work backwards, and figure out what related projects there are. Of course, as a high school student, the work you do in one field will probably be applicable in other fields as well, but you should still do the research because learning about a subject helps you pick up context and ideas that will help you when you’re working on your applications. And, if you find a discipline that you love, even better.

Also, don’t neglect industry as a place to work. Startups and large companies also have good opportunities, especially in areas like engineering.

Other than that, be aggressive and be resourceful. Skills like math and Physics C experience are useful, but you can’t compete against graduate students and professionals in academics. Having a high school student who’s good with physics is helpful in the lab, but having someone who knows Sketchup or Matlab is better. If you have skills like that, mention them, but make sure you use tangible examples because everyone says they’re resourceful and intelligent.

More to the point, research is about discovery. Even though it’s a tedious and slow-paced process, scientists have to improvise constantly. And, as a high school student, you don’t have the knowledge that university researchers do, so you’ll have to make up for it by taking extra initiative to find out things. Believe me, it is astounding how much more those grad students know that we do.

And tell me how it goes.

1. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to find work in an AI lab or something like that. Actually, talk to me if you’re interested in that kind of stuff, since I don’t have time to go into too much detail here. [↩]