For high school and college students, an internship at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) can be a launching point for a career in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). But sometimes students from disadvantaged school districts, community colleges or smaller universities may not be familiar with these programs. 

That is something two programs at PPPL this summer aimed to change. The Plasma Pathways Summer School pilot program introduced high school students to plasma physics and fusion energy and encouraged them to apply for internships, while PPPL’s annual Workshop in Plasma Physics for Undergraduates is intended to introduce community college students and students early in their college careers to internship opportunities. 

“One of the goals of our science education program is to create a pathway for all students into careers in STEM, and these programs do that,” said Arturo Dominguez, head of science education. “The future of science depends on having a wide spectrum of thought, and to achieve that, we need scientists from a variety of backgrounds.”
 

Plasma Pathways Summer School 

Aniyah Jackson, a rising senior at Trenton Central High School, was one of six students who spent part of her summer learning about fusion energy and plasma physics and working on a science project through the month-long Plasma Pathways Summer School, one of many programs at DOE national laboratories across the country. She left with an idea of what her future career might be. 

“I’m getting a lot of experience in the STEM field,” Jackson said. “It’s encouraging me to stay in the field. It’s making me really excited to start working. I want to be an electrical apprentice here at PPPL.” 

The students gathered at Trenton Central High School each morning and rode a bus to PPPL, where they had breakfast and took classes in the morning. In the afternoon, they worked on science projects, most involving plasma physics or fusion energy research.
 

Encouraging applications to high school internship 

Leaders of the program encouraged Jackson and the other students to apply for a high school internship at PPPL, said Shannon Swilley Greco, science education senior program associate, who organized and oversaw the program, which aims to introduce more diverse students to internship opportunities. 

“This program is about building an inclusive environment and really focuses on supporting these students,” Swilley Greco said. 

The students worked on hands-on research projects with a mentor and presented posters at a session along with undergraduate interns. Nayeishka Gonzalez and Erica Vicente-Sajche, both rising seniors, worked to develop a computer code that creates graphs that analyze plasma behavior in a fusion reaction. They said they enjoyed the experience of presenting a poster and explaining their research to fellow students and scientists. “It’s kind of surprising how we could answer all the questions!” Gonzalez said. 

Gonzalez said she found the material challenging when she first started the program. “It was a bit frustrating at first because we didn’t know much about what was going on, but the more we learned, the more we understood,” she said. 

“They’ve been very understanding,” said Matthew Abdel, a rising senior. “If we say, ‘backtrack a little bit,’ they don’t get bothered. They say at any moment that we can stop them to ask a question, and they would explain.”
 

Training teachers and mentors 

One of the goals of the program was just that: to teach students in a positive, constructive way. Olivia Cao, a master teacher who recently graduated from Princeton University’s Program in Teacher Preparation, trained the graduate students who served as teachers and mentors on how to encourage the students. They learned about messaging that might unintentionally discourage students. While telling students, “You got this,” might seem like positive feedback, for example, it may have the opposite effect on students, who could feel that they’re being told they should be able to complete a given task but aren’t able to do so. 

“It’s a place where they’re free to ask questions and be vulnerable in sharing gaps in their knowledge,” Swilley Greco said. “They’re encouraged to speak up when they’re struggling, and that’s something they might not feel comfortable doing in their school and something they might not think they can do in a working environment.” 

The summer school is part of the DOE’s Pathway Summer Schools for Students. It was funded by the DOE’s Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) and is part of the DOE’s Office of Science’s Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce initiative. The program aimed to build a relationship with Trenton Central High School so that historically excluded students are aware of opportunities at PPPL, Swilley Greco said. The school’s approximately 2,700 students are either Hispanic (63%) or Black (35%).   

But more than that, the program was designed to overcome obstacles that prevent students from disadvantaged districts from participating in these opportunities. “This is a good experience for them,” said Jessica Massenat, a teacher leader at Trenton Central High School who helped Swilley Greco organize the program. “I think of it as getting them into the science community.” 

The program provided a bus, for example, because students don’t have cars, and there is no easy way to get from Trenton to PPPL, which is 12 miles away, through public transportation.  

“Transportation has always been the big hurdle for the majority of our students,” Massenat said. 

The program also provided breakfast and lunch to the students who come from a district in which 55% of students receive free or reduced-cost lunch. Most importantly, the students were paid to participate — a crucial part of the program to bring in students who would otherwise choose to get summer jobs to support themselves and their families, Swilley Greco said. 

All the students were encouraged to apply for high school internships, and two internships are being reserved for the participants. “It’s really going to change how we do our high school internships,” Swilley Greco said.
 

Workshop in Plasma Physics for Undergraduates prepares students for college internships

Swilley Greco also organized PPPL’s Workshop in Plasma Physics for Undergraduates, which aims to encourage more students to apply for the DOE’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) or Community College Internships (CCI) through a one-week workshop in which the students get some background in plasma physics and coding and meet scientists, student interns and graduate students.

Students participating in the workshop, which is also funded by WDTS, are required to apply for an internship. The program not only offers them tools to prepare them to do that, but it also aims to encourage students to feel they belong in the STEM field. “We see it as a program to identify STEM identity and develop the field,” said Swilley Greco, who organized the program along with Abdel Majid Kassir, an associate research physicist in science education. 
 

Talking to student interns  

A highlight of the week was a panel discussion with some of the SULI students, a few of whom first came to PPPL as part of the undergraduate workshop. They learned that it’s important to be enthusiastic on their internship applications and that it’s OK not to know everything when they arrive. The interns also emphasized that while they worked hard, they had fun together when they were off. They played ping pong at lunch, took trips to the city and participated in a trivia contest at a local pub.

“I started in astrophysics,” said Andrea Paola Hernandez, a rising senior at the University of Puerto Rico, who was a SULI student for the second time this summer after participating in the undergraduate workshop in 2022. “Last year, I was very nervous I wasn’t going to meet the expectations they had,” Paola Hernandez said. “My main language isn’t English. My mentor was great from the get-go. I had a blast last summer. It was awesome. It turns out, half the time, people know the same things you know.”

Lizzie Flores, a rising junior majoring in physics and astronomy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, said she particularly enjoyed talking to the SULI students on the panel, who told her a student like her who started at a community college could succeed as an intern at PPPL. “We were able to see they were just like us a couple of years ago,” she said.

The students said they enjoyed visiting PPPL’s fusion experiment, the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade, and appreciated the classes in plasma physics, computation and coding. “I found it really interesting because I didn’t know a lot about plasma physics, and I wanted to learn more about it,” said Midori Learned, a physics major at Santiago Canyon College, a community college. “It seemed like a great opportunity to do that.”