For students interested in gaining professional experience in STEM fields over the summer, research, programs and internship opportunities present opportunities to supplement in-school learning. Although they may seem mysterious to students who do not know where to look, here is a brief guide to the array of opportunities available.

Research Internships

Through programs like Stanford’s Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program (SIMR), UC Santa Cruz’s Science Internship Program (SIP), MIT’s Research Science Institute (RSI) and independent research arrangements, students are able to explore scientific research opportunities before college. While formal research programs require an application and essays, many students arrange research mentorships by simply emailing the heads of laboratories at universities.

Nikita Ramoji (12) conducted research at a computer science laboratory at Stanford after contacting several heads of labs through email.

“As Harker students, I think we’re really lucky to be able to get that experience because you can develop a relationship with someone that smart and qualified and learn how to do research from them,” she said. “It’s not something you can learn from the textbook because we’re doing stuff that’s way beyond what we should be doing in high school.”

Corporate Internships

Courtesy of Randy Zhao

In contrast to academic research, students can also choose to apply to intern positions at companies. Though most established Silicon Valley companies like Google, Facebook and Apple primarily offer internships only to college students, start-ups and smaller companies often take on high-school interns.

Senior Johnny Trinh interned at Eligo Energy for two months last summer, working on a web application for their software developers.

After contacting the company’s chief executive officer (CEO), Johnny set up an interview time and was accepted as an intern after answering some technical questions.

Johnny believes that interning at a tech company gave him a valuable insight into how projects in the industry are different than those in school.

“Working in a professional environment is something you usually don’t have exposure to at school,” he said. “The most glaring difference between the classroom and the workplace is in the classroom they kind of guide your hand and give you guidelines on what to do and how to implement it, whereas in the workspace they tell you what feature they want and you do the research online on how to do it.”

University Courses & Programs

Students can also gain knowledge in various STEM fields through taking college-level courses during summer sessions at various institutions.

Anooshree Sengupta (10) participated in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Outreach Summer Program (SAILORS) after finding out about it from WiSTEM last year.

“We learned how to create an AI algorithm from the ground up. Our mentors just kinda threw us right in and we got to learn it ourselves, so that was great,” she said. “We also got a lot of exposure to a lot of other opportunities we could try, and every day we used to have a lecture by a professor who had some work related to AI.”

Nikita also participated in the three-week Management & Technology Summer Institute at the University of Pennsylvania last summer after hearing about the course from a Harker alumnus who had participated.

“A big part of what I wanted to do that summer was to decide what type of computer science or what type of engineering I wanted to go into the future, whether it be building a product or a company route or going into more of a research route,” she said.

The fast-paced three-week experience involved taking a business and engineering class, listening to speakers and working on labs, homework and individual projects.

“We accomplished a lot in a very short timespan, and you leave with a better sense of how you spend your time,” Nikita said. “You’re amazed with how much you can do, and you leave feeling like you can accomplish more than you thought you could before.”