What Vacation?

By Bob Grant What Vacation? Johanna Joyce (W); Alison Spencer (T); Gary Bassell (A); Dan Pong (C); Will Bringgold (T); Karen Kirner (I); Barbara Kirkpatrick (N). Bassell, Pong, and Bringgold images courtesy of the bassell lab / www.basselllab.com Ah summer! It's a time for easy living, a relaxed teaching schedule, perhaps a leisurely sabbatical, some tall cold drinks, and... undergraduate interns. The National Science Fou

Written byBob Grant

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Ah summer! It's a time for easy living, a relaxed teaching schedule, perhaps a leisurely sabbatical, some tall cold drinks, and... undergraduate interns. The National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program places about 140 undergrads in biology labs every summer, while the National Institutes of Health invites about 800 undergraduate researchers to work in its intramural laboratories in an average year. These aspiring scientists can waste your precious reagents, make egregious miscalculations, and just take up space. But they can also bring big rewards. A summer internship done right can not only launch a young scientist's career, but can also further your research and push it in directions you never expected. All in 10 short weeks.

Here are some stories of successful internships and the tricks that made them work.

The Mentor—Johanna Joyce, Memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer biologist The Intern—Alison Spencer, 21. Internship: summer 2008 The Program—SURP (Summer Undergraduate Research ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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