STEM

As a first-generation college student, Barbara Garcia had to figure out a lot of things on her own when applying for college. Her parents were Mexican immigrants who didn’t go to college and couldn’t help her navigate the application process, couldn’t help her study for the SATs or look over her application essays. 

“Being a first-generation college student has influenced me by teaching me independence and helping me to carve my own path,” Garcia said. “I didn’t have my parents to guide me toward STEM – I just sort of found it on my own and discovered physics on my own.” 

When friends asked Promise Adebayo-Ige what he was doing over the summer, he told them he was trying to save the world by working at a national laboratory devoted to developing fusion energy.

Adebayo-Ige has been fascinated with the idea of fusion as an inexhaustible, inexpensive, and clean source of generating electric energy since he was a teenager. Now a rising senior majoring in chemical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, he plans to attend graduate school in nuclear engineering with the goal of working on the quest for fusion energy 

Interns work with PPPL researchers on a variety of projects. 

One day after Labor Day, four early-career technicians officially began four-year apprenticeships at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) where they will learn cutting-edge skills both on the job at a national laboratory and in the classroom.