Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash
Last summer I found myself in a life-changing opportunity, more specifically in heated debates with some of the greatest minds of modern science. From Apollo astronauts to the engineers behind the newest Artemis rockets, you can definitely call it a once-in-a-lifetime summer. And that’s all due to a NASA research internship in Texas, USA. Not only did I get to experience every science geek’s dream of working at NASA, but I also got the opportunity to gain real-life experience while making life-long friends. And now, I’m here to tell you how.
It all started with the application to one of the most selective internships in the whole of the United States, consisting of several essays, recommendation letters, and a 3-minute video talking about who I am and my previous experiences. You can call it a public embarrassment when I took my best friends to shoot a NASA application video to the very city center of Bratislava, Slovakia, in hopes to show how different living in Europe is in terms of STEM opportunities, but with some editing and photoshop the video turned out better than I could have ever imagined. And then of course months of waiting in anticipation.
After getting my acceptance letter, I and all the other interns were right away given a week's worth of study materials to master the area we’d later be working in. We did not yet know our research teams, talked to our mentors just in case of technical issues and basically spent a month behind a screen watching video lectures and completing assignments. Since I was selected to conduct research in Earth Sciences, I studied several modules on atmosphere, remote sensing and climate science. It was only after tens of lecture videos, assignments, and presentations that we were ready to dive into actual research.
At first, it went down pretty slowly but shortly gained pace. It started with a few meetings trying to get to know each other, come up with a research question, and gather weekly data on land cover in our areas, but after the first week, it escalated pretty quickly. Every week we had a special guest, an expert in his field that delivered a speech and held a discussion. From engineers, data scientists, experts of diversity and inclusion to the famous Apollo 13 astronaut, Fred Haise. For many, myself included, talking to him was a once in a lifetime experience we will never forget, as we just sat there and so casually discussed the changes in NASA’s budget.
Even though these lectures were the highlights of our weeks, we spent most of our time in small teams that we were divided into based on our skillset and interest. There we finalized our research questions, with my team specifically focusing on the use of AI to prevent the spread of mosquito-spread diseases. Once we did that, we started meeting almost every day for weeks, for hours at once, writing code, doing data analysis, and in general working with our mentors to deliver the best result possible.
One of my first tasks I did during my internship (and one I am pretty sure I will never forget) was writing the code to filter the datasets, to keep only the ones that were accepted by GLOBE and had labeled a genus type. What to even a beginner programmer seems like an easy task, turned quite challenging when I ended up coding it during a team meeting at 2:00 in the morning due to the time differences between Europe and the United States. That night we stayed up approximately until 4:30 AM to cut the data to approximately 5000 images, further divided into 3 mosquito genus types. The ironic thing is that we ended up using barely a fraction of those images as the computational power of our computers was not powerful enough to run more.
Similarly, we reached a state of mild panic when our original research idea got rejected a day before the deadline. Thus, we had 24 hours to form a viable research question to be able to continue the internship, and to make things even worse, I spent the majority of those hours at an airport with very limited wifi access. Luckily, my team members pulled it off and with the help of our peer mentor, we were able to start the research. Working with AI way before the ChatGPT boom was extremely difficult at times and on occasion got way beyond my scope of coding skills but that’s when your team members come in and working with much more experienced people than I was myself really saved the project.
That’s not to say I didn’t find my area of expertise. As a graphic designer and expert on the visual aspect, once it came to graphically presenting our data, either for a poster, video, or just a graph, it was me who spent my days and nights adjusting the margins, cutting the videos, and overall making the results presentable. Of course, I’ve undertaken many other responsibilities, including writing code to filter our datasets, writing parts of that paper, and many others over the course of two months. This made us all realize how essential a team is in the research environment and that you should never be discouraged by not having enough expertise in a topic. Not everyone was an AI expert but also not everyone was a writer, Python programmer, or one of the tens of skills we needed.
At the end of the summer, we did not only deliver a presentation in front of all our mentors and other research groups at the NASA SEES Symposium but also published a research paper and got an invitation to present our research at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, one of the biggest science conferences in the world. This being a huge success we were able to make contributions to the field of Earth Sciences and our work got recognized by many experts in the area. After all, how many high school students get to do all that within the time frame of a few months.
I believe this story just shows that you do not need a PhD. or years of experience to make a difference and work on cutting-edge research in any field of STEM you can dream of. We were just a group of high school students with a peer mentor and access to some really cool tools and we turned it into valuable research that is now featured in Forbes. So, if you want this to be you, take your shot and apply to a few internships next summer, you never know how it might turn out!
If you want to find your next internship and get a similar experience this summer, head to www.chanceinternships.com to find out more!
