While our main programs take place in the summer, we also have scope for research internships during the school year for students in 10th, 11th, and 12th grade.

These are only for students whose schools fund such programs. Schools will describe them with names like “work based learning” or “career technical education”, and they will have a mechanism for paying students, as long as the student can find an internship program to work with – that is where the Institute for Computing in Research can be your mentoring organization.

If your school has such a program, please contact us. We can work with your school to see if it is viable, at which point we can discuss specific projects.

Students interning “during the year” will work on projects in or adjacent to their area of interest. In most cases these projects will be selected by the Institute to have a focus on developing educational materials for the Institute. Very often the projects will involve developing a chapter for the book of “mini courses” that we use to train students ahead of time.

Here are a couple possible scenarios (others might be possible) for a during-the-year internship. They are all contingent upon the school having a funding mechanism.

1. An Institute intern from the previous summer has been invited by their mentor to continue collaborating on their project, and their school can fund them through a work based learning program. The student would continue working with their mentor from before.
2. A student has discovered that their school has a work based learning program, and has learned enough about it that they can put us in contact with the coordinator. Once the Institute makes an agreement with the school, the student will have to engage with us, satisfying the prerequisites, and then apply at our usual page, stating that they are applying for a during-the-year internship. In this situation the Institute will pair the student with a mentor with the goal of developing research materials for our educational programs.

And of course please contact us if you have questions.

The Institute offers a pipeline of educational activities leading to the final phase, an internship program in which students are paid to work for a month of the summer, mentored by established scholars or technologists in their field of interest.

The pipeline consists of the following steps, which are all free of cost, and the final of which pays the students. Picking and choosing is fine: they do not have to be done in order.

any time from 6th grade up [next: 2024-10-26+27]

serious computer programming for youth workshops – a 10-hour workshop that teaches to program in python, on Linux, with emphasis on the command line and using a programming editor.

after the workshops [next: ongoing every fortnight]

drop-in fortnightly mini-courses, in which students write small programs in a wide range of research-related areas, from visualization to mathematics to science to digital humanities and more.

research skills academy [next: summer 2025]

a 3-week summer program aimed at immersing students into the variety of non computational techniques that the Institute considers important for a young researcher.

math and science working groups [next: fall/winter 2024 – starts week of 2024-10-07]

working groups of students who want to go beyond what is taught in their schools, including “visualizing algebra”, Taylor series, Fourier series, numerical solutions to differential equations, and physics with calculus.

after tenth, 11th, or 12th grade [next: summer 2025]

paid summer internship – a 4-week summer program in which students are paid to work full time on a single research project. This is modeled on the Los Alamos student programs – focus on full-time research work. This final stage is in-person in Santa Fe, Portland, and Austin.

The pipeline materials are taught from free/open-source/open-access web books written by by co-founder Mark Galassi, a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, with significant contributions from current and former students in the pipeline.

Please contact us with questions on any of these steps – email: mark@galassi.org – phone: +1-505-629-0759.

What we offer

We offer a paid research internship program for students in Santa Fe (NM), Portland (OR), and Austin (TX) who are finishing 10th – 12th grade. We pay students a stipend so they can work full time on their research for 4 weeks: July 8-August 2 2024. Students are paired with a world class researcher who mentors them in this period.

About the Institute

We are a consortium of scientists and students who develop advanced computing methods applied to physical science, life science, social science, arts, and humanities. Our goal is to develop the best ways to train young students to do research.

Students:

We seek applicants from a broad range of backgrounds and interests. Please view our web materials and follow the instructions to apply. Note that the prerequisites listed on our web site must be satisfied well before the internship begins.

Principals and Faculty:

Please refer your very motivated 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students for this summer’s internship program.

Apply by clicking here

Flyer for summer 2024

Please download the flyer linked here and pass it around!

Our mentors are active scholars, scientists, or technologists who have a research project to propose to one of our interns, and are available to do a small bit of following them as they work on it. There is no restriction on what mentor and student decide to do, as long as it can be developed with free/open-source software tools.

We pay the interns (who have just finished 10th or 11th or 12th grade) to work full time on this project for 4 weeks in the summer. (Example: 2024 will be from July 8 to August 2.) Their skills are varied, but we have taught them all (a) linux command line, (b) python, (c) a programming editor, (d) a bit of LaTeX. Many have done much more.

We have deliberately designed the mentor duty to be light. For example, there is no need to help our interns debug code: they get plenty of help from their cohort and from our Institute-wide chat rooms which involve interns from difference cities and volunteers. Students also benefit from on-site support, so there is no need to monitor their energy.

We have observed a whole spectrum of mentor involvement, from occasional interaction to frequent contact. In the former case the students learn more independence, and in the latter case they can learn more of the mentor’s specific technique – so in both cases it works well.

Topics that students have worked on come from a very broad range. We have seen projects in ecology, genetic sequence alignment, cognitive science, pure mathematics, physiology, linguistics, physics, digital humanities, art, music, electrical engineering, information technology, astrophysics, machine learning, DNA memory, cybersecurity, … And we would like to see even more academic areas! The project might involve modeling, data analysis, simulation, …

And we recommend that the project be close to the mentor’s area. Even if students come in with a strong feeling for what they want to work on, it’s often good for the mentor to have them work in an adjacent field – this way interns develop a unique combination of skills which is very important to position them for research and for college admissions. But… we are not part of the process: student and mentor figure it out together. Another thing to remember in the choice of project is that the student is not hiring a private tutor – they are paid to do research, and do need to work on the project the mentor finally guides them to.

Some time well before the start of the internship we introduce mentor and student with a brief videoconference. The mentor might propose a reading list for the student to get prepared and learn the background, and they could even settle on some project details ahead of time.

A typical week in the interaction might consist of the following: a videoconference once every week or two, and an exchange of email a couple of times/week. Student and mentor will usually converge on a rhythm, and there is quite a bit of variation: some mentors might follow more closely.

And remember: we are all researchers – the Institute is engaged in the lifelong research project of the best way to do transfer of know-how from mentors to interns. This means finding ways for busy mentors to work with students, without it having too much impact on the mentor.

Please contact Mark Galassi at mark@galassi.org – or call +1-505-629-0759 (voice only) if you might be able to propose a project to a student!

What we offer

We offer a paid research internship program for students in Santa Fe, NM and Portland, OR (and tentatively Socorro (NM) and New York City) who are finishing 10th – 12th grade. We pay students a stipend so they can work full time on their research for 4 weeks: July 10-August 4 2022. Students are paired with a world class researcher who mentors them in this period.

About the Institute

We are a consortium of scientists and students who develop advanced computing methods applied to physical science, life science, social science, arts, and humanities. Our goal is to develop the best ways to train young students to do research.

Students:

We seek applicants from a broad range of backgrounds and interests. Please view our web materials and follow the instructions to apply. Note that the prerequisites listed on our web site must be satisfied well before the internship begins.

Principals and Faculty:

Please refer your very motivated 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students for this summer’s internship program.

Apply by clicking here

Flyer for summer 2023

Please download the flyer linked here and pass it around!

As we start our fourth internship season in Santa Fe and our second in Portland, OR, this coming Monday, July 11 2022, the Institute for Computing in Research will open up in Austin, TX.

The Austin pilot will have 6 students from high schools in the Austin area. They will work with world-class mentors on topics in physics, computer science, linguistics, and cognitive science.

Once again we are being helped by well-organized institutions: the Austin cohort is made possible by donations from Optiver, which is sponsoring a significant portion of the program and hosting us in their offices.

Given what we have seen from our students in Santa Fe and Portland, and given the credentials of the students in this cohort, we expect very interesting research to come out of the Austin pilot. This will continue to contribute to the answer to our key question:

how can you craft a well-balanced pipeline of young students that leads to real research?

Mark Emry, from McNeill high school, will be directing the Austin cohort, joining our remarkable team consisting of Rhonda Crespo, who directs the entire Institute and works on site with the Santa Fe interns, and Maria de Hoyos who directs the Portland program.

What we offer

We offer a paid research internship program for students in Santa Fe, NM and Portland, OR who are finishing 10th – 12th grade. We pay students a stipend so they can work full time on their research for 4 weeks: July 11-August 5 2022. Students are paired with a world class researcher who mentors them in this period.

About the Institute

We are a consortium of scientists and students who develop advanced computing methods applied to physical science, life science, social science, arts, and humanities. Our goal is to develop the best ways to train young students to do research.

Students:

We seek applicants from a broad range of backgrounds and interests. Please view our web materials and follow the instructions to apply. Note that the prerequisites listed on our web site must be satisfied well before the internship begins.

Principals and Faculty:

Please refer your very motivated 10th , 11th , and 12th grade students for this summer’s internship program.

Apply by clicking here

Flyer for summer 2022

Please download the flyer linked here and pass it around!

After our third internship season in Santa Fe, New Mexico, we start a pilot for the Institute for Computing in Research today (August 2, 2021) in the Portland, Oregon area. We will pay six students to work full time on research for most of August 2021.

Last fall we were contacted by someone suggesting that Portland might be a good place to implement this type of paid internship for high school students.

The Institute’s approach of focusing entirely on real-life research with a mentor (including research in non-STEM areas, and a research-oriented approach to applied technology), largely inspired by the internship experience of Los Alamos National Laboratory, does not have a counterpart in the Portland area, where the many excellent summer opportunities are focused more narrowly on engineering, and do not offer the cross-pollination of an academically diverse scholarly community. In addition, the emphasis on advanced scientific computing, deeply rooted in software freedom, is unique to the Institute.

We tugged at threads in the Portland area and found excellent people willing to design and run a program there based on our blueprint in Santa Fe. They have been helped by well-organized institutions: the Beaverton Round is offering us office space, and the Oregon Community Foundation is funding the Institute’s pilot program.

In addition, scholars at Portland State University, Reed College, and Oregon State University have been invaluable in helping explore the issue of:

how can you craft a well-balanced pipeline of young students that leads to real research?

We will have mentors and guest lecturers from these universities in this pilot program (as well as some far-flung lecturers, since remote lecturing is now a “thing”).

We have had three very successful years in Santa Fe, and we expect remarkable work from these six founding students in the Portland area. It looks like two will work in computational biology, two in natural language processing, one in pure math, and one in AI and game theory.

I myself am in tears of joy as I see all this happening, and I am very grateful to the volunteers who crafted the Portland program, our program manager who is working on site with the students, and the scholars from Portland area universities who are mentoring our students.