10 Awesome Summer Internships for Science Students

The National Science Foundation sponsors hundreds of summer programs, which allow sophomores and juniors to get their first taste of real labwork. Most of them last ten weeks and pay more than 3,000 dollars to cover your living expenses.

NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) search page

Opportunities are not just for college students. The Office of Naval research runs the Science and Engineering Apprentice Program (SEAP) for high-school students, and the Naval Observatory is a participant, as are a number of other DoD labs

We’ve had an intern in our program, and also when I was at TRIUMF; there’s always the question of whether you will get net work out of a student in a short time frame such as this. You really need to have projects lined up that can be done with the kind of backgrounds that the students will have, without requiring a lot of oversight and intervention, and that has a good shot of completion. On the other hand, if you have any decency you don’t want it to be complete drudgery — it’s not an opportunity to let the undesirable work slide downhill, unless you have a tiny heart made of Grinchonium. (But if you do that, word will get around and you won’t get any interns anyway. The grunt work is really for grad students, if you have them, who are more of a captive audience, where you can sell “cleaning the diffusion pump” as an initiation/hazing, that you won’t have to do once the next student is tricked recruited) My main interaction with the SEAP students has been in helping them print out the posters for their presentations they do at the end of their internship, since our division has a plotter, where they learn a valuable lesson in Murphy’s law: if you wait until the morning of the session, there will invariably be a problem printing the poster out.