By Ornella Attias, Year 10
Throughout all 5 years of high school, students look to find and create enjoyable, educational, and interesting experiences. Eden Chung in Year 13, for example, experienced an internship on a subject she is passionate about: science.
Eden participated in a two-week program with only 24 Swiss students from around the country! She participated in the High School Students Internship Program (HSSIP), pursuing a two-week internship at CERN, also known as the European Council for Nuclear Research. “CERN is a collaboration between European countries to form a particle physics research center and contains the world’s largest particle collider.” says Eden. In fact, what we know as the World Wide Web started out as a project that was developed at CERN.
What sparked Eden’s interest in wanting to do this program was simply that she has always been interested in science. Never being able to properly visit CERN, she decided that she would take the opportunity to do an internship there since this is her last year in Geneva before going to university abroad.
Eden learned many things while at CERN which are ancillary to both the scientific side of education and also adult life education. Being at CERN for 2 weeks, she felt that she got an inside view to what an adult career in the field of scientific research might look like. She believes it was a truly excellent experience. Eden states that “over the 2 weeks, we had several main activities: lectures from CERN scientists, tours of the facilities, and working on our individual projects. I learned a lot about particle physics and about all the different facilities, which was a great experience. Unfortunately, we could not visit the colliders as they were in use. In addition, the project I was working on was a device to detect different types of radioactive particles in the air, and I learned how this project has many applications outside of physics. It is being used in the medical field, X-ray scanning, material analysis along with many other applications. I learned that a lot of work being done at CERN has many applications in real life.”
“The most unique part about this internship program was that we were put into pairs and each assigned to a specific research project under a supervisor, who was the head of that research project. This was great as we spent a lot of the two weeks learning in-depth about this project, and we were able to meet the various people working on that project, including electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, data analysts, physicists, and chemists, which helped us understand what day-to-day life is like. Working on a single project for 2 weeks also allowed us to understand the project well enough that we could help with certain tasks: for example, we helped program certain functions to help improve the sensor chip. Then at the end of the internship we each gave a presentation on our project and what we had worked on during the two weeks, so we all got to learn about many different projects going on at CERN,” explains Eden.
Overall, this internship was a great experience that was very intriguing to Eden and surely many other students. Eden recommends this program to her fellow peers, without hesitation, as she found it was an unforgettable opportunity! She would like for students interested in scientific research to be able to experience what she got to experience. Unfortunately, CERN only offers the HSSIP program to Switzerland once every 3-4 years.
