May 08 Issue - Employee Monthly Magazine

My View

Scott Robbins, Here's to a successful summer internship

Photo by Dixon Wolf

May marks the beginning of the Laboratory's annual influx of summer student interns. This is an exciting period, especially for the students, mentors, and members of the Student Programs team in the Science and Technology Base Programs Office (STBO). Students come to Los Alamos from all over the world to cultivate job skills related to their academic majors and to help out in both technical and administrative support organizations. For the next few months, the Lab and the Los Alamos community will look and feel just a little bit more like a college town with more than 1,000 students added to our census.

Formal rites of orientation and training dominate the first week of a student's internship. Among the various encounters orchestrated at this time, probably none is more important than the initial meeting between the student and his or her designated mentor(s). Mentors commit a very significant amount of their time and assume a profound responsibility to ensure a positive result from the student's internship experience at the Laboratory.

The positive results of successful student internships take various forms. While acquiring new skills that directly complement their academic studies, student interns make very significant contributions to the technical and administrative workload throughout the Laboratory. Between 2002 and 2007, 42 percent of all technical staff members and 30 percent of the technicians hired had served at the Lab in a student intern or postdoc capacity. In the 2007 fiscal year, former interns and postdocs represented 59 percent of technical staff members and 71 percent of technicians hired by the Laboratory.

Of course, the ultimate measure of a successful internship is harder to quantify. Did the student learn something valuable? Did he or she return home or to the campus safe and healthy? It is with these goals in mind that on behalf of the STBO Education and Postdocs Program Office and the entire Laboratory, I warmly welcome all students arriving for the summer 2008 student internship season!

-Scott Robbins, Science and Technology Base Programs Office--Education and Postdoc Ofice