Summer internships can make or break someone's pursuit of a career field, college, or major. High school student Mary shares the main lessons learned from her experience studying the thermal impact of solar power with mentorship from Ankur. Outreach coordinator, Peter, chimes in with how he started and continues to run a successful educational program.
Transcript
Qing: To start off with, I want to just hear a little bit from each of you. How do you even know each other? Because y'all actually do know each other.
Peter: I help facilitate a high school research internship program that allows high school juniors from the local metropolitan school district to spend nine weeks doing research in research labs on UW Madison's campus. And so as part of that, we go out to high schools and we talk about the program and recruit students who are interested in learning more about STEM fields, who are interested in learning about research. Then we want to have them find a placement in a research lab. So I also reach out to faculty on the UW Madison campus and let them know about the program and see if hosting a student for nine weeks in the summer is something that aligns with their goals, both for their research and for their community engagement and impact, and if mentoring is something that they're really interested and excited in. Through that process, that's how I met Ankur and told him about the program. He's been a mentor for our program for a number of years.
Ankur: I don't actually remember when we first met. I want to say it was one of these workshops potentially where there was an opportunity to connect various outreach programs in the city, on or on campus with researchers like me. My lab has often a need for summer researchers, particularly often with undergraduate students, but when this opportunity opened up to also extend this to high school students, it seemed like a fun way to be able to get some more students involved in our science. And through the years, every year this email comes out from Peter looking for potential lab hosts, and since I'm not very good at saying no to my email. I intend to say yes because I'm always intrigued by the really high quality of students that Peter is able to attract to the program and the kind of work we can do over the summer with them.
Mary: Yeah, so I'm one of the high school students that was recruited by the process that Peter was talking about. So I heard about the Science Research Internship Program through my high school as a junior. I applied, got in, and then I started looking for specific labs and professors that I might want to work with that kind of focused on my interests. The first way I actually met Peter, talked to him was, I think, over email, and I was asking him for advice, and he recommended Ankur's lab. From there, I reached out to Ankur, and we were able to email and meet one or two times in person before officially starting my project. But then throughout the summer, I worked pretty closely with Ankur in his lab.
Qing: What were your interests there?
Mary: As a junior, I took an AP environmental science class and a physics class. And those two kind of sparked my interest in STEM in general, but also like carbon cycles, the water cycle, like basic things like that. And then in my physics class, learning about gravity and forces and energy and that type of thing. And I just thought it was super interesting that there's so many things kind of going on around in the background in the environment and that we're also like able to understand them. And I thought that was really cool. So when I learned about this internship, It seemed like a great opportunity to get more experience learning about these things outside of school and spend my summer in maybe a more like productive way that could potentially benefit me in the future and teach me more about these topics.
Qing: What is flux science? Like what did you learn about what flux science is?
Mary: Definitely, like with my experience, I've realized that there's still so much that I can learn with flux science. I looked at like solar panel installments and how they affect temperature. I also thought about looking at like evapotranspiration and different things that happen like as a result of interactions between Earth and the atmosphere. So that's kind of my main understanding.
Ankur: I think we should have Peter on the spot and ask him.
Mary: Yeah.
Peter: I'll pass.
Ankur: Right? One of the things I try to do whenever we bring new students or researchers into the lab is have them read foundational papers in our field. I have a website with papers from Dennis Baldocchi and a few others that talk about what is the breathing of the biosphere, what is the history of Eddy Covariance, what is land-atmosphere interactions. And while I don't expect somebody at a high school level necessarily to understand all of those, it's really nice that we have some of these large foundational papers written by some of the folks in our field who have been really good at bringing in lots of researchers and being able to have students just read those and then get them out to like, oh, look, here's a tower and here it is measuring stuff.
The way I like to define this is flux is anything that's stuff per area per time, but that's a little bit missing the nuance and the importance of that because that can explain everything from molecular diffusion up through large-scale biosphere and atmospheric interactions to solar system scale interactions. What we're really talking about here is the role that the biosphere and geophysical system that we live in actually talk to each other. They talk to each other through the exchanges of carbon, heat, water, nutrients, and other gases through fluxes.
And there's a funny story about this. I was coming back from the recent AmeriFlux meeting in Tucson, and at the very quiet TSA line at the airport there, I was wearing my t-shirt that says, Cool as Flux. The TSA started talking to each other, the agents, about what they thought my shirt meant while I was going through the detectors. At the end, they kind of said, we decided you're an electrician. I was like, that's the wrong kind of flux. But it's kind of related in that the flux that I look at is how the climate is welded together. They thought that was good enough.
Qing: That's a good story. If nothing else, now they have a sense of what flux means in the climate space.
Ankur: You never know where education happens. It can happen even in a security line at the airport.
Peter: With a cool t-shirt.
Qing: I'd love to hear more specifically about your project, looking at solar panels and temperature.
Mary: So like Ankur mentioned, I was kind of introduced to some of these ideas with foundational papers that he sent me. I also had a mentor that I worked with, Bethany Blakely. So those two sent me some papers to kind of get my thoughts flowing, get me familiar with some of the things they were thinking about. So the UW Physical Sciences site out in Kegonsa has a solar array, and we decided to look at how that solar array impacted the land surface temperature in that area. We also looked at a solar array that was installed differently. The ones in Kegonsa were called agrivoltaic solar arrays and then there's photovoltaic arrays in this other site. And we kind of looked at how they potentially affected the land surface temperature in different ways.
One way we looked at it is I used this instrument, that ECOSTRESS instrument on the International Space Station and looked at images of these two sites that told me the surface temperature on different dates. I was able to look at it in a seasonal way, like take images from four different dates, spread out throughout the year and see what the land surface temperature was on those dates to see how those compared. Also, I compared those land surface temperature measurements with cropland nearby to see how the temperature in the two different areas compared. Another way we looked at it was over multiple years, taking land surface temperature measurements from multiple years before the array was installed and then the year it was operated. So those are the main ways that I looked at land surface temperature.
Ankur: The core goal of this project is really to understand the ecosystem impacts from expansion of solar renewable energy across the planet and what that means for the fluxes of things like heat and water that impact temperature. It's been a really fun new area for me as well. Most of my work is in more natural ecosystems and in land management related questions. But over the last few years, there's been a lot of interest in whether we can use our flux technology and flux science to better understand these growing solar arrays. In Wisconsin, because the solar arrays are competing for land against agricultural land, there's been a lot of interest in whether we can grow food and produce energy at the same time with these so-called agrivoltaic arrays, which have been popularized in certain parts of the world, especially in the southwestern United States, as well as in Germany and a few others, but less so in the Midwest because there has been some concern about their impacts to things like the water cycle and local temperatures. We actually got a call from the State Public Services Commission, which regulates utilities, that had specific questions related to that from individuals who were concerned about expanding solar arrays. So there's a very applied part of this question in terms of policy relevance, being able to provide scientific data that allows policymakers to say, this is what we think will happen if we put an X acre solar array in this landscape to things like local temperature.
Mary showed up, and my default is to kind of run through a million and two ideas then try to figure out which ones were actually tractable, and I think we threw out maybe a few. This one, I think, fit really well. Also, we had an undergraduate research experience for undergraduate researcher Liz, who was going to also do some more work with infrared temperature measurements on the flux tower itself to see if we could partition both temperature and ET under the solar panels and between the rows, then tie that to some potential drone sampling we were going to do to get higher resolution land surface temperature over the course of a diurnal cycle, which we were able to do later in the summer. And so by combining those three pieces of information with this heat flux measurements from the tower, we're able to kind of make an estimate of the mechanisms that generate the land temperature differences that Mary was seeing on the satellite. And that's where we're headed to next.
Maoya: Can you describe or tell sort of the story of an aha moment when you were working with the data where you saw something where you're like, oh, now I really know what this is about that you wanted to keep working on?
Mary: One of the main things that really caught my interest with the project was that solar energy is a promising alternative to fossil fuels and other types of energy, but there can also be concerns, like Ankur mentioned, with its effect on the nearby environment. When I was able to go to the solar farm and see that I can take actual measurements from this place and see the actual numbers of how it could be affecting the environment, it just put into perspective.
Ankur: Yeah, it was really fun to be able to send Mary into the site for a visit when we were doing some of the imaging with the drones. It was a super hot day that Mary actually went out with Liz and then with another colleague of mine, Christian Andresen, in the geography department. I was showing up a little bit late delivering some cold drinks. I remember getting there. I was expecting everyone to be completely melted and hot and sweaty, but they were like looking at data and they were excited about getting another sampling going on and we were taking some selfies and just having a good time. One of the great things about our science is that the object we study is on the ground and in the air right where we live. Having sites nearby allows us to get better access to things like researchers, especially undergraduate and high school researchers, or public visits to Eddy Covariance sites.
I'm a big believer in Ray Leuning's phrase of know thy site, as in all of my students and researchers who work in my lab, even if they're mostly modelers or mostly computation, at some point physically step foot in a site. The nice thing about having Eddy Covariance sites that are run by PIs that we have access to is that we can get to those sites and we can put people into those sites and really understand this is what you're looking at in your computer model, in your satellite data, in your AI machine learning data combinations. From that, you can make inferences about how the world works. And once you see a site, once you step foot in it, really makes a lot of sense how all these things work. That's always one of my favorite things to be able to do.
Peter: And Dr. Andreson is also one that has taken students in the past as well.
Ankur: Also has now a flux tower in the Arctic.
Qing: What has surprised you about connecting researchers at the university level with high school students?
Peter: There's several things. One that's been really surprising is how excited that high school students get about this work, about the opportunity. Sometimes it can seem like students don't get excited about anything. As a former teacher, it was always like, you're talking about this really cool science and you get blank stares like, wait, this is the best thing ever. You should want to know more about this. So it was cool to see students approach something that can be really big and challenging and scary, right? Like I'm a high schooler and I'm going to the University Wisconsin to do research and to tackle it head on and really be excited about it. Conversely, the faculty mentors, there's no compensation for them from our part. Our internship is really one that relies on the willingness of faculty to want to jump in and provide an opportunity for students. You think about like, okay, you find a couple, but there's been a number of faculty who have done this year after year and provided opportunities for students. The other cool thing is that it really is an impactful experience. Sometimes it can take a while to see results or you're not like sure, again, as a teacher, you're like, well, I had students for a year and they moved on and you don't know necessarily what your impact was, but the students and the parents who I've talked to after the program have said it's been one of their most impactful learning experiences. So that's also been really cool to be a part of.
Ankur: For me, who's brought in students into the lab pretty frequently, somebody else might ask, why do that? You're hired at a research university as a faculty. Your job is to create new knowledge and communicate that to undergraduate and graduate students. Part of that is really that I view myself as, first and foremost, an educator. What we need to do is be able to make our science accessible to as many people as possible everywhere. By doing that, sometimes we end up with really surprising results. Sometimes we end up with people who discover new passions and ideas that we would have never expected. What I love about working with the Madison School District is that it is the second largest school district in the state of Wisconsin. It is very diverse. It brings in students from many, many backgrounds all over the world. You never know who you meet. You never know where they come from. I often tell my students when they're planning their summer projects, if the end of the summer you come out of this saying, I hate this and I never want to do research again, you should still count that as a win because you've learned something new about yourself that's going to help you determine your next steps and your path, and that's okay. And on the flip side, we've had students who are like, I love this so much. I want to keep working on this. And we end up co-authoring conference talks or papers or sending them to conferences or having them go on to college and in careers that continue even in Eddy Covariance work. So that's just really fun to see.
Everybody, regardless of what their age is or what level of training they have, can bring something to science. I think the best scientists in the world are four years old. They're good at asking questions and questioning assumptions. The main difference between them and us is that we're able to articulate that into professional communication. Everybody who comes in my lab, and Mary participated in our lab meetings through the summer, we don't really differentiate what level people are at. I have a postdoc, you heard about Bethany, who was the co-mentor here. We have graduate students, we have undergraduates, we have long-term researchers, tower techs. But when we're in that room in the lab meeting, everyone is the same. We all learn from each other, and my goal in my life is to be able to train people who become smarter than me on the topics they're looking at. That's where I want them to end up. And it's really fun just to watch that process, even if it's just for five or six weeks in the case of a short-term internship, or five or six years in the case of a PhD, or even 18 years when we talk about how long the Tower Tech's been involved with our work here. That's a big piece of it. And I like that the University of Wisconsin in particular supports that, which is not always the case at some universities. We have this ethos called the Wisconsin Idea. It is our unofficial mission statement, but it basically is that the founders of the university orders at the state and that's been extended to the globe and more recent wordings of that. But it says that we have a mission in a public university to be useful and helpful for all people everywhere, not just the students that walk in our doors and pay tuition.
Mary: A big takeaway from the internship for me was it kind of initially felt like a big leap to get involved with professionals, people who knew more than me. It's kind of intimidating. Not anymore. But the first time when I met Ankur, I was like nervous and like, oh no, he knows so much more than me. But it definitely didn't feel like that. It felt like I could bring value to the lab. It showed me that even if I maybe have less experience, it doesn't mean that I can't find something really interesting or play a role in the lab.
Maoya: I'm curious to hear more of how that felt, being given the opportunity to do something that the people around you actually are waiting for you to find out.
Mary: I worked from home except for a meeting I'd have with my mentor, these lab meetings. Sometimes I'd get confused or have moments where I was like, I don't know, what is this day's work that I'm doing actually going to turn into? But then I would talk to these other people in the lab and they'd be really excited to hear about what I had done or what I had learned or answer questions that I had. And that was really cool to see that these little things that I was doing each day were actually going to lead me to an exciting result.
Maoya: I'll ask Ankur a similar question of how do you stay curious after doing this for 20 plus years?
Ankur: Having good collaborators, having good students who want to explore ideas. I love going to meetings like AmeriFlux or AGU, catching up with collaborators, sketching out new ideas, going to lab meeting and seeing somebody discover something that they hadn't thought about before or finding a paper. It's really about keeping that energy going. And it's hard, especially right now where we are in an environment where A lot of our science is under attack, and a lot of our funding models are being reconfigured. In some ways, we've actually started to lean more on each other. I feel like at conferences, we've gotten even more curious about wanting to just talk about research and ideas to get away from all of the negativity of the world that's around us right now. And that really makes me happy to be with other people and interact. The science we do is highly collaborative, and as much as we all tend to lean naturally toward our introverted sides as scientists, there's a lot we gain from working with each other.
Peter: For the chemistry department here at University of Wisconsin, our view, our sort of philosophy for outreach is to be visible by being helpful. There's certainly lots of ways you can engage in the community and do outreach and things like that, but our role is to figure out where is there a need in the community and how can we help. Part of my role is to build sustainable relationships with the community, with community groups, to understand what kinds of things are they dealing with, what kinds of needs do you have, can we provide support in some way. And can we collaborate together to come up with a solution for this issue that we might be facing? In Wisconsin, a lot of them revolve around natural resources. Natural resources are such a huge part of our state, our tourism industry, our economics, of our culture. So if you just think about what might be an issue that is facing a community related to water, for instance. Well, you could talk about PFAS, we could talk about chlorides, you could talk about algae blooms, we could talk about so many different things. And these are multifaceted issues, there isn't just one thing that may solve those. There are pieces that require some chemistry understanding, that require some atmospheric understanding, that require some physics and some engineering. By tackling these things together in a collaborative way, those things get solved. The power and the benefit of collaboration, that's really the center of it all. Learning the things that can be useful are really much more important. Again, thinking about chemistry, we've all had chemistry classes and you had to memorize things and do the things and fill in the blank just right or whatever, that provides somewhat of a good starting point. But how many of us really use those things on a day-to-day basis? If we're thinking about things in my drinking water, it doesn't start with something that I memorized. How can I use that information in a meaningful way? Being able to learn and then to apply that in a way that helps others is really powerful.
Mary: Another thing that I really liked about this internship is applying things that I have learned in school classes, things that maybe I had started off as memorizing names of things, different terms, then seeing how relevant some of those issues are. There's a need to learn more and use that knowledge to help my community.
Peter: One thing I always used to say when I was a teacher was that everybody is a scientist. So while most of the people who take a science course might not become a researcher, they are a part of a community. So many of the things that we face require some knowledge and understanding about how science works and how do you work together and how do you come to solutions and how do you be productive together. So it's a big shout out to both the university who embraces this program and the Madison Metropolitan School District, who is the funder and provider of the opportunities. They allow students to do this for the summer. Students enroll and are undergrads for the summer, so the district pays for the tuition. And students earn a college credit for going through the program. So their commitment is really clarifying and really beneficial.
Ankur: How do you get these things to scale? How do you expand or replicate? And how do we make sure it's open to as many people as possible, even ones who maybe don't see themselves as scientists? We had some similar conversations with another program the school district ran for a while, which was more middle school based. I'll tell you what, high schoolers are fun in the lab. Middle schoolers are kind of wild in the lab, but it was still fun. That program kind of faded away partly because of personnel changes, but also partly because they were struggling with how to sustain and scale that. I want to know a little bit about what's made it successful for the high school program at MMSD. How do you get something like this to scale up in a world with limited resources?
Peter: Some of the main reasons why it's continued to work is the dedication of the district to fund it, to be able to provide funding for the tuition, to provide a summer salary for an instructor who works with the students. The students have a summer seminar once a week for all nine weeks, and they learn things about being a researcher. How do you attack a research paper to read it? How do you use the library resources on campus? Where do you go when you need an answer to a problem? How do you communicate with your PI? So we have an instructor that we work with to write curriculum. for our students. There is some limitations to that, but I think the way to get it to scale up would be sort of a joint collaboration. So if we were to think about using this as a model for a grant proposal and think of funding to provide students perhaps a stipend, to provide maybe a stipend for labs to cover some costs that they may incur, and then produce our summer seminar in a way that would involve students from around the county, around the state, there certainly are models that Wisconsin has that do just that. So I think to get it to scale up would be a partnership between a faculty or a department on campus, the school district, and some funding to be able to provide opportunities for students to remove barriers and perhaps some advertising. I get probably 10 to 15 requests from students or parents from other school districts other than MMSD saying, I read about this program, it sounds amazing, we'd love to be a part of it, or sometimes from school districts. We just don't have the possibility right now, but the interest is there. People would love to be involved. The success of the program would indicate that it would continue to be quite impactful for more students.
Ankur: I was wondering, Mary, what would you have been doing last summer if you weren't doing this internship? What would you have done instead?
Mary: That's something that I thought about while I was applying. Most likely I would have gotten a summer job. It probably wouldn't have taught me as much about the topics that I'm interested in or the field I might want to go into. Maybe I would have made some money, met some friends, but I think in the long run, like this taught me a lot more and gave me a lot more experience, even if I don't necessarily do research.
Peter: Did you feel that this experience clarified anything for you about your choice of school, major, or career goal that you might have?
Mary: Yeah, I definitely think it did. Before, my interests were a little more general, but because I was able to focus on these solar installments, I'm definitely more interested in solar energy and energy use. A lot of the stuff I did was remote, and I didn't love that. So maybe it taught me that I want to do more hands-on field things.
Ankur: I got to do one of my favorite things, which was to write you college recommendation letters. That's always fun to do with the high schoolers because it's different at that level than writing ones for grad school or for faculty positions.
Maoya: It's a fairly overwhelming, scary process to go from high school into what you're going to do for the future. Maybe you could just add on top of that how this experience might have helped turn that into more of like a hopeful feeling versus a disorienting feeling.
Mary: There's so much going on kind of out of my individual control with the environment, but I was able to focus on something specific this summer. It's possible to change things to help the environment. It shows that it's not just all, everything's just going wrong and there's just nothing we can do about it. There's still more that we can learn and specific things that I can do and focus on that can have a real impact.
Peter: I want to share with you a quote in an e-mail that I got from a parent. This was a previous year's cohort about her daughter's experience. She said, 'can't say enough about the program. Academically, it was educational and challenging. Originally, she didn't want to do it. She would like to be a surgeon. It turned out, however, she loved research. Now she's open to research as a career. She is attending UW-Madison, majoring in global health. This gives her opportunities in research and possibly infectious diseases. Emotionally and personally, though, the program was amazing for her. She was nervous to go off to college, to leave home in security. Going to campus for the internship, getting lunch on campus, made her realize it wasn't so scary and that she could do this. And in fact, her experience was a big part of her personal statement.' So I think something like that just provided A multitude of opportunities and experiences that provided academic guidance, but also a personal experience that said, oh, okay, I can do this. You're going off to school the first time and like, I don't know what's going to happen right now. It's sort of like a halfway point where, oh, I've been there and I tried it out and I think I can do this. I just thought that was a really cool statement to make.
Ankur: Yeah, in some ways it mimics my own experience. I didn't do much science research in high school or college, but as I was starting to get into Eddy Covariance, I was working with an advisor who was setting up some early flux towers. And it was very intimidating for me. I'm a very clumsy person. Whenever I go into the field, I definitely injure myself. But after finishing some time in grad school, I was looking for a job. I got this recommendation that I should work for this lab that is setting up a brand new flux tower. And you're going to build it. was very intimidating, but having somebody to walk into the door with who could vouch for me and say, hey, you got this, really changed my whole perception of what I could do. I spent six months by myself in the wilderness of the upper peninsula of Michigan, building a 130-foot-tall tower that's still running 25-plus years later. But it was not something I imagined myself ever being able to do or anything that I would do in my career as somebody who started as a computer scientist. It's kind of important how some of those little moments can make a big difference in somebody's life.
Qing: Each of you offered such wonderful, good stories, illustrating this particular example of how we really do impact each other. That might be cheesy, but... I appreciate hearing about the care and the curiosity that all of you bring and have brought to this experience, both for the summer internship, but also this podcast.