Summer Internships for High School Students and Undergraduates
Currently we support three, eight-week summer internships each year, for regional high school students and undergraduate college students. The internships take place during July and August and are designed so that students are intimately involved in individual projects that directly contribute to the larger research goals of the McCouch RiceLab at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and the Eizenga Lab at the Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center in Stuttgart, Arkansas. Students employ state-of-the-art techniques, in concise projects tailored to accommodate the abilities of each student. Each project is designed to test a hypothesis or to develop a relevant scientific technique and both the intern and the mentor may report on results as a discrete contribution to research. Interns do much more than simply help out in the lab or the field - they are immersed in concrete projects that contribute to the larger goals of the project, and students are instrumental in advancing the research.
The McCouch RiceLab has a long tradition of student internships, with successful NSF-funded interns from 2002 till today. Two high school summer interns took the project they started in the RiceLab and went on to win the Siebens-Westinghouse Science Fair team award in 2003. In addition to their own research activities, students are well integrated into campus summer programs and events that enrich their experience.