Interested in getting a summer job related to physics? These accounts were written by Princeton students who have taken physics-related summer jobs, on or off campus. Read them over and see what you think! You can now submit your own job reviews electronically.
The summer after my freshman year, I worked in Professor Romalis' lab. Getting the job was a completely informal process: I emailed Professor Romalis my CV, and asked for a job. We then set up a little appointment to talk about working for him, which basically consisted of him asking me if I could program, and me telling him that I couldn't (at which point I was offered the job!). That's how I would go about looking for a job in the physics department - just send out an email asking for one!
That summer I worked on three projects. The first one involved the manufacture of a low-noise current source. Professor Romalis would come up with a basic design, which I would then proceed to solder. Then typically, the design wouldn't be quite as good as we hoped it would be, at which point we would improvise and change things around. This project didn't exactly work out, so I started spending more and more time on the next one, which was essentially a series of basic design projects. The group was building a new magnetometer system, and I had to do things like design a new rack for the system. This stuff was fun, but after a while, I ran out of things that needed to be designed, so I moved onto a third project, which involved a lot of Mathematica simulations. The idea there was that you have some sort of electric current in the brain, and though we can determine where that source is by placing detectors outside the head, we can't pinpoint the location exactly because inherent in the data would be some noise. The question that I set out to answer was this: given a certain level of noise, what sort of accuracy can we expect from our calculations of the location of the current source? This was a lot of fun, and was definitely the best part of the summer job.
After my sophomore year, I did something completely different: I decided to work as a Teaching Assistant at a set of summer programs run by Johns Hopkins University - their Center for Talented Youth (CTY) summer programs.
The CTY programs are basically a set of intensive summer programs that are geared towards gifted middle school/high school kids. There are two sessions every summer, each 3 weeks long, and the kids can choose to enroll in one or the other, but not both. At the camp the kids 7 hours (!) in class every day, and spend the rest of their time participating in activities organized by their RAs. It's definitely a "geek camp". As the TA for their "Fast-Paced High School Physics" course, I was expected (along with the instructor), to teach a year's worth of high school physics to these kids in 3 weeks! (And what's even more amazing is that they learn everything just fine!)
I went to CTY as a student, and loved it, so I knew I definitely wanted to go back as a TA. The decision to go back was a good one, because the experience was one of the best summer experiences I've ever had. It's true that the hours were long (7 hours of class + prep), but it was so much fun it didn't feel like I was "going to work" when I got up in the mornings. The pay was also good - we got $950 per 3 week session, and room, board, and food was included.
The only downside to working at CTY is that the application is a bit more involved than working at, say the Princeton physics department. I had to fill out an application form, get transcripts sent to JHU, get recommendations, write a cover letter, and have an hour-long telephone interview. This all had to be done by late January. Despite that, I think it's a great experience, and everyone should try it!
CTY Info: http://www.cty.jhu.edu/
I spent the summer following my Freshman year working in the Astrophysics Department with Neta Bahcall on the large scale structure of the universe. My work built upon that of a recently graduated senior who's thesis had been to determine the shape and alignment of clusters from a simulation of the universe that had been run from a set of initial conditions until the present (roughly 13.7 billion years) on a supercomputer for several days, evolving the system under our current model of the universe, lambdaCDM; that is a universe containing cold dark matter (approximately 1/3rd of the energy budget) dark energy or cosmic acceleration (lambda), and flat geometry. Following the senior's work on clusters from this data, I would search for superclusters, the largest structures of the universe. Because of their size, these structures act as fossil remnants of the earliest epochs of the universe. Gravity has largely not had time to shape them into the spheres and disks of the rest of the universe, rather they are thought to lie along filaments and wells formed near the beginning of time. Studying these helps reveal more about those conditions and the interplay of factors that have shaped them, while comparison of these simulation results to observational studies provides a powerful check on our current model of the universe. Already observational data on superclusters seems to suggest the filamentary structure, and more data is rapidly becoming available thanks to new large scale projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Hence my task was to search for these same structures in the simulation data. I used a friends of friends algorithm to organize the clusters determined in the senior thesis into even larger superclusters and followed several lines of analysis in order to determine their characteristic number and mass distributions and shapes. The results have so far been positive, though there remains a third phase of the investigations to take place looking at the most distant, high redshift superclusters, and my advisor is confident that we'll get a paper out of the research.
Setting up a job in the astrophysics department could not have been easier. After a guest lecture by professor Turner in my Freshman Seminar I asked him about summer opportunities in the Astrophysics department. He instructed me to email professor Knapp, who coordinates the undergraduate summer research. I hadn't taken an astro course yet nor had any experience with computer programming, nonetheless with that one email I was set. Later professor Knapp sent all interested students a list of professors looking for students for certain projects. As I had little idea what I wanted, I decided to let the upperclassmen respond and I'd take what was available. I showed up the first day I set up to work not knowing what I would be doing, but professor Knapp took me to the office of Neta Bahcall, the department representative, who immediately offered me the supercluster project. Moments later I had an account set up for the computer system, keys to the library and the building itself, a stack of journal papers and a seat in front of a Unix machine which I didn't even know how to log into. I think the only things I accomplished the first day were how to adjust the keyboard, my chair, and start the X server, which kindly informed me that tea was in 6h43m2s. With the help of some intro to C books and the advice of Professor Knapp and other undergraduate students I was programming away on the project by the second week. I would meet weekly with Professor Bahcall to discuss my progress on the project and review the theory, while an incredible research technician assisted me when I ran into more technical problems programming. The hours were 100% flexible -- I could be paid for up to 40 hours a week, and could put in those hours at any time of the day or night. Working mostly on computer and with keys to the building as well as the ability to work remotely through secure shell I could determine my own schedule completely.
Meanwhile the Astrophysics department does a wonderful job reaching out to their undergraduate students. Everyone uses first names, undergraduates are warmly welcomed to the ten o'clock morning coffee where professors and researchers discuss the day's most exciting papers from astroph and other breaking news in the department or the field, while the graduate afternoon tea offered a very informal way to relax and learn about others in the department. A weekly lunch was also provided for the undergraduates where a professor or graduate student would give a talk on subjects ranging from the interstellar medium to understanding the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. Not only was learning about computing and my particular aspect of astrophysics, but was being actively introduced to many of its most exciting frontiers. I couldn't have asked for a better summer experience.
The way I got my job was not the way I would recommend you get yours. I didn't start looking for work until rather late in the year, figuring that I would just look for summer work a month or two before summer started. Unbeknownst to me at the time, standard practice around here is to line up your work several months in advance, i.e., in December and January, not April or May.
In my ignorance, I began to look for work in early April with the expectation that it would be easy to come by. It just so happened, luckily for me, that someone who had signed up to work for Professor Meyers had quit their job a day or so before I started looking for work. Being, I believe, the first to have come to him after the vacancy had been created, I was chosen to fill it.
Professor Peter Meyers is a High Energy Experimentalist, and currently part of the Princeton Division of the MiniBooNE Neutrino Oscillation Experiment at Fermilab. My job was to make measurements of the time and charge response of photomultiplier tubes to light. I worked for one month on the Princeton campus, and one month on site at Fermilab. The stuff I did was very hands-on experimental work, and I learned my way around a lab. I feel that I now have a better sense for what it would be like to be a High Energy Experimentalist.
Although I almost screwed the pooch by not applying for a job earlier than I did, I did do one thing right. I wrote up a little resume which contained my name, email address, and all the information about me that might pertain to a job in physics. I then went door to door asking professors for jobs and handing out copies of my resume so that they had my contact information in case they wanted to get back to me. I would recommend doing what I did, only a few months ahead of time. The professors seem to have an open-door policy, and it would be a good idea to take advantage of that. Don't be shy.
During the summer of 2004, I worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Along with one other Princeton undergraduate, I tested materials that will eventually be used in detectors for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). Professor Lyman Page is Principal Investigator for the ACT project, and you can find out more about it from his website. At Goddard, my work was not directly related to cosmology; instead, it mainly involved determination of the electrical properties of various materials at cryogenic temperatures. I worked extensively with liquid helium and hydrogen, and the internship was a good introduction to working with cryogens. Moreover, my work allowed me to experimentally observe interesting phenomena such as superconductivity, and I consequently became interested in learning more about phenomena that arise in materials science and condensed matter physics. I plan to pursue this interest in the upcoming years at Princeton and through future summer work.
My supervisor at Goddard was Dr. James Chervenak. Dr. Chervenak's official title is "Systems Engineer" but he has a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics. Along with the other members of the Detector Systems Group, he was very helpful in showing my coworker and me how to use the lab equipment and how to use the data that we retrieved to plan our next series of tests. He also notified us of lectures and activities that were going on around Goddard's campus and made arrangements for us to have borrowing privileges at Goddard's library. At the end of the internship, Dr. Chervenak had us present a portion of our results to the members of the Detector Systems Group.
In addition to Dr. Chervenak, I had a supervisor at the company through which I was contracted, Raytheon. This supervisor was also quite nice and occasionally dropped by at Goddard to talk. However, I must say that I would have preferred to have been employed directly by NASA. Since I was not part of a program for undergraduates but rather employed through a contracting company, I also had to find my own residence. I chose to live across the street in an apartment complex, and while this did turn out to be a fairly instructive experience, students who receive an offer to be employed in a similar manner should note that this inconvenience exists. Other programs at Goddard do provide housing (and perhaps mealplans) at local schools like the University of Maryland — College Park. If you do choose to rent an apartment, I suggest that you visit it first, since Greenbelt is not in the greatest county in Maryland. Of course, Greenbelt does have some redeeming qualities; it is close to Washington, DC and this ensures that there is usually something to do when you have free time.
Research Adviser: Professor Choueiri. Good professor to work with. Gives helpful feedback, if you put in the expected work.
Application process: I worked with Prof. Choueiri through the PPST (Program in Plasma Science and Technology ( see http://www.princeton.edu/~ppst/ for details). Email scohen@pppl.gov to apply.
Brief description of research: Electrostatic waves can be used to heat up charged particles in a plasma (a high-temperature, highly ionized gas). I studied the effects of using two beating electrostatic waves, a technique which has various qualitative advantages over using just a single wave. I had to read up a few papers on the subject to get familiar with the material, and then wrote some C code to do numerical simulations to see how the efficiency of the heating process depended on the different parameters of the system.
During the summer of 2005 I worked with Prof. Lyman Page on developing a prototype bolometric array that will be used as like a CCD in the yet-to-be constructed Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). ACT, once completed in the high, arid deserts of Chile, will incorporate new and innovative technologies to achieve a resolution of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) never before seen. Generally, I was very excited to get started, and especially on the first day, the amount of respect and responsibility that Lyman accorded to me was astounding. My first objective was to familiarize myself with the basics of circuit design with some rudimentary exercises that Lyman provided. I really felt like an experimenter, reading only a little bit of "The Art of Electronics" and mostly just testing things out to get an intuitive understanding of electronics. This was the only busy-work that I was given the whole summer, but rightly, as I had no previous experience in electronics. After that, I was given the task of building the sensor interface electronics. We use commercial/industrial pressure gauges, thermometers, and magnetometers that nevertheless need to somehow interface with the inputs of our computer system. So, I spent most of my time designing the circuits that would appropriately transform the signals from the sensors, ordering the necessary parts, building them, troubleshooting them, and finally, installing them. (The troubleshooting definitely takes the longest.) I also spent a fair amount of time down in the shoproom, building a mounting box for the magnetometer that would fix its position relative to the inclination of the telescope. In all, it was entirely hands-on, experimental (as opposed to theoretical) work. Lyman is a great mentor because he provides advice when you ask for it but otherwise lets you do your own thing and try out your own ideas. In addition, I worked with a few grad students who were all of invaluable help. The work environment is messy--there are parts lying around literally everywhere - but extremely relaxed. I was so pleasantly surprised to find absolutely no bureaucracy, and that everyone treated everyone else with the same kind of respect.
Where you worked: Shenk lab, Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton
Who you worked with: Dr. Leor Weinberger (post-doc), under Prof. Tom Shenk (little interaction with Professor Shenk; constant daily interaction with Dr. Weinberger)
What you did: cloned stuff and designed a bacterial vector with virus promoter and reporter genes inserted into it for infection of mammalian cells (never got around to the actual infection part); did a bit of image analysis on fluorescence microscopy data
What you learned: a lot of basic molecular biology techniques (far more, and more thoroughly, than what you do in Mol 350 bio core lab, for those of you who have taken it): bacteria and mammalian cell culture, DNA manipulation (extraction, purification, etc), cloning (DNA recombination, PCR, restriction digest, bacteria transformation, using vectors), primer design and DNA sequencing, pretty much every molecular biology technique you would ever need or want to know; image analysis; fluorescence microscopy; VectorNTI, ImageJ, and Matlab; some computational stuff with modeling protein expression with differential equations; how to do/design experiments; a lot of molecular biology
Overall rating from 1 to 10: 9
What would you recommend to someone interested in the same job as you had?Any other comments: This is not the job for you if you hate pipetting, but if you can stand that, it has a great payoff of really, really, really making you understand molecular biology, how to do experiments, and what they mean. There could also be a much more computational/data analysis side to the project, although I was focusing more on experimental work. The experimental side would definitely only be for someone who's really interested in and enjoys the bio part of biophysics, and not just the physics part; otherwise you will have problems if you get easily frustrated/bored with mindless mol bio manipulations. However there are many other aspects/approaches to the project that you could take.
Where you worked: Austin lab, Department of Physics, Princeton University
Who you worked with: Dr. Will Ryu (genomics), Prof. Bob Austin
What you did: designed and made silicone and agar microstructures for nematodes to swim/crawl around in, in order to investigate their movement; a few chemotaxis assays
What you learned: bacteria and nematode culture, photolithography, mask design, a lot of photolithography, some Matlab/ImageJ/image analysis, nematode physiology/biology, data analysis
Overall rating from 1 to 10: 7
What would you recommend to someone interested in the same job as you had?
Professor Austin is a fantastic experimentalist and gives very good, critical (but constructive) advice on whatever it is you're doing, what you should be doing, what your results mean, how you should be thinking about them, and where to go next with the experiment. If you're not intimidated or otherwise put off by his personality (he seems to be a bit of a polarizing influence), he's a great person to work with and just talk to in general as well, and will gladly give you as much career/course/academic/other advice as you want. Very laid back and flexible. However, you will definitely need your own motivation, sense of direction, and idea of what you want to do and how you want to explore the problem, since I only saw him for 1-2 hours every two weeks although I was working in his lab. He travels a lot, which is a very important consideration to keep in mind. The other students and postdocs in his lab are a great group of people, generous with help and advice, and very friendly and approachable as long as you're not shy (if you are shy, that may be a bit more of a problem), but they can't really give you an idea of where you should be going with your experiment, which you'll probably need more often than once every two weeks. It's also awkward to bother them about every single detail that you're confused about, which you'll have to do in the first week or two when you're getting acquainted with the lab, techniques, etc.
Will is a fantastic advisor, great to work with, friendly and fun to talk to, flexible though not as laid back as Professor Austin, and will give you great advice on what to do with your experiment, but it's difficult to work with him when he's a building and a street away. I did meet with him 2-3 times every week to talk about my results and how things were going, but being relatively inexperienced with independent experimental work, that really wasn't often enough for me, and I should have sought more guidance from him. The physical separation of his lab in Icahn and Professor Austin's in Jadwin is more of a problem than it seems at first.
Any other comments: Will is investigating some extremely interesting and insightful biological questions in all of his projects, and does a fantastic job of pulling together the strongest and most useful techniques in physics, biology, and mathematics in order to answer them. He does truly interdisciplinary work on a daily experimental level, and from talking to him, you can really tell he has a vision of where he wants experiments to go, which to me is very important when I'm working on a project, so that I see the meaningfulness and application of the work. He's also an excellent teacher and explains things very clearly. It's great to talk with him about biology and science in general, and you can acquire expertise in a range of many different areas (engineering, physics, biology, computation/modeling) in his lab. Both he and Professor Austin are very enjoyable to discuss science with.
Another benefit of working in Professor Austin's lab is the weekly lab meetings, when group members present their current research and results for 45 minutes or so; it's very interesting to hear those and you'll learn a lot from both the presentations and the questions that people ask afterward. A big benefit of working with Professor Austin is how big his lab is (a lot of different projects going on, but not so big that you get lost in it -- actually it's a very friendly environment) and how many people he collaborates with, so you get to be exposed to a lot of different people's work.
Where you worked: Physics Department, Technical University of Munich (RISE exchange program)
Who you worked with: Sebastian Muehlbauer, Dr. Christian Pfleiderer
What you did: Designed and tested magnetic susceptometers to measure the onset of superconductivity in neutron scattering experiments.
What you learned: A great deal about solid states physics, especially on superconductors. I also learnt to use LaTeX, SolidWorks, Origin, and LabVIEW.
Overall rating from 1 to 10: 8
What would you recommend to someone interested in the same job as you had?
If you are interested in solid states physics in general, and if you are willing to face the initial culture shocks, you will probably find this job highly rewarding. A basic knowledge in superconductors and German certainly helps. However, English is spoken in the lab, and I managed the 10 weeks with extremely rudimentary German.