Opportunity
Jul 9th 2007WallabyGeneral & nerd alert
We’ve got some high school students working in the lab with us for the summer. Sounds like fun, right? Great opportunity for experience that’ll jump start their interest in science – and their careers.
Well, maybe I should say “working”…
All three of them seem to have a great time with us – playing games on the web, and talking to their friends on the phone. Descending into the depths of the basement lab to actually do some experiments seems like a positive chore for them. As does reading papers, or talking to the boss about what they’ve been learning.
(I’ve been rather impressed with how much time he does put into checking in with them, actually. He’s very eager for them to actually get something out of the summer besides a paycheck and a line for their college applications.)
I can understand their lack of enthusiasm – this is NOT a lab I would’ve picked to put high school students in. There’s just too much to try to pick up before you can even really follow what you’re watching someone else do – it’s tough enough on our grad students. And me, come to think of it. And the experiments themselves aren’t all that impressive to look at: Sit in front of a black box turning a Thing, wait for the computer to tell you its done, twiddle the Thing a bit, watch the computer do its job again.
At the same time, it’s really starting to get my goat. Perhaps it’s envy or something. Pretty much every summer in both high school and college, I tried to find some kind of job (well, opportunity) to work in a lab of some kind. I even tried hospitals and water testing companies, which would’ve been pretty boring but hey, at least it would’ve been chemistry of some kind. Never did find anything at all near where I grew up; there just wasn’t much in the way of chemistry going on down there.
I wonder how he picked these three. Two are from the large run-down city three towns to the east; one goes to a military-style private school somewhere in Indiana. That one hasn’t even had a class in chemistry or physics yet. (Fortunately he’s working with one of the more patient grad students.) One worked with us last summer, which means that, if he actually pays attention to anything besides text messaging on his phone, he’s going to a have a paper published in a major journal by this fall. (Not even out of high school yet. I was gritting my teeth to flip burgers at his age.) The third one is apparently just here because she might want a career in science. Or might not. Again, no chemistry classes yet.
Don’t get me wrong, I firmly support the idea of giving high school kids a chance to see “real science” of some kind or other, even when they don’t have a chance of understanding it from what they learned in school. It’s a much better way to understand how things really work (and how scientists really work) than they’re going to learn in any number of AP classes. And this is the first professor I’ve worked with who’s ever had *any* high school students, that I know of. So I *want* to like them.
It’s just… out of all the high school students in the state, these were the three he picked? I don’t expect them all to be going out and winning science fairs by building their own Raman spectrometers, but… What happened to the ones who’d see it as more than just free internet access and a cushy paycheck?
There are some of those, right?
Right?