bfish
Posts: 267
Joined: Feb. 2006
|
| Quote (Lou FCD @ April 10 2009,06:32) | | I caught up with one of the first students from Coastal to get this internship a few years ago, and asked about what all it entailed. I expected to be just washing test tubes and the like, but she told me that they put her right in with the grad students doing real sciency stuff (including washing test tubes, but also learning what the grad students were doing). |
It's funny, I was just talking about that with a coworker yesterday. We were trying to decide if we should take an intern this summer or not. We have some boring work that needs to be done, and we both felt guilty at the idea of foisting it off on some poor intern. Which is maybe a strange attitude, because we do boring things all the time.
I don't know what the intern program is like at UNCW, but it's probably similar to the one where I work. I've had several interns over the last few summers - high school students, undergrads, and teachers. It's hard to get a lot out of your interns, since our program is so short (6-8 weeks), and you have to train them before they can be of much help. Still, as much as possible, we give them a few interesting tasks. A little bit of shit work, too, but we all do that as part of our jobs anyway.
We use the analogy of a cooking show. There is almost never time to do a full experiment from beginning to end, so we have them do one part of the greater experiment, and then, hey, look in the oven, here are some things that are ready for the next part of the experiment! I was very pleased last summer that we worked it out such that my high school interns were able to generate actual data and present it at the talk they had to give. They were collecting data the day before the talk, so it was a tight fit!
Anyway, good luck. Hope you get in.
|
