Internship pairs Santa Fe students with Los Alamos National Laboratory mentors

Sep. 11—Computer scientist Mark Galassi said he noticed there weren't many students from Santa Fe being invited to take part in internships at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he works.

That's why he joined forces with Monte del Sol Charter School teacher Rhonda Crespo to create the Institute for Computing in Research internship, where they pair high school students with mentors to teach them how to put their programming skills to use.

"For me, a big deal was the teaching kids to program how we really do it in science and engineering, versus these toy model programming approaches where kids take them, and it doesn't really bring them any closer to doing the real work," Galassi said.

This summer, the institute recruited 11 students from Santa Fe, 11 from Portland, Ore., and 11 from Austin, Texas to take part in the program. Each student is paired with a mentor who works in their city and is tasked with creating a programming project based on whatever subject they are interested in, whether it's biology, physics or even music.

Galassi and Crespo said they hope their program will help prepare these young pupils to become the next generation of scholars, researchers and programmers.

"Right now, they are high school students who are doing work that you see at the undergrad or graduate level, that level of performance," Crespo said. "They have that ability to further that particular research, and it just gives them that bug that they're like, 'This is what I want to do in life.' "

She said a few of their previous interns have already gone on to do further research, present at science conferences and publish their work.

The pair said they plan to expand the program to New York City and Socorro next year, but a lack of funding has kept it from growing in Santa Fe.

"We submitted a grant to the Oregon Community Foundation; 10 days later, they give us $37,000," Galassi said. "In Santa Fe, I've been, for three years, trying to get the city to get real about offering us funding, and they sort of have promised it but never delivered."

In Santa Fe, the institute relies on small grants and donations to keep the internship running. Crespo said they will normally hire as many students as they can, based on the amount of funding they get.

Student interns get a stipend equivalent to the living wage for a 35-hour work week, which is currently $12.95 an hour. Galassi noted it will likely increase in the coming years, as the cost of living rises.

In addition, interns are given a budget to buy a computer for the internship, which they then get to keep.

Emlee Taylor-Bowlin, a 16-year-old student at Monte del Sol Charter School, said she spent her time in the internship programming a model that illustrates neuron changes in an octopus's brain. She worked with Joan Mudge, a senior scientist at the National Center for Genome Resources in Albuquerque, to learn about octopus DNA and create a model using the Python programming language.

"She was really able to help teach me basic biology on how a neurological system works and how DNA can help edit neurons," Taylor-Bowlin said. "It's definitely a lot of work, but because you're there all day, you can get it all done. It's an uphill battle, but it's really a lot of fun."

Gabriella Armijo, 16, also from Monte del Sol Charter School, said she wanted to do something with engineering when she went into the internship.

She eventually decided to focus her project on satellite collision avoidance after talking to her mentor David Palmer — a scientist at LANL — about space and satellite crashes.

"I really enjoyed it; it was a great experience for me," Armijo said. "I learned about satellites, how they work and how they orbit around the Earth."