The second annual Student Internship and Research Showcase will take place tomorrow in the PAC lobby from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. During the showcase, students in the EEE Internship class will be presenting posters regarding their respective internships as a part of their final project for the class.
Though she is not a part of EEE, senior Lily Salzer interned at the University of Missouri’s International Center and based her final poster on the work that she completed at the center.
“Basically what I did was sort of familiarize myself with internationalization,” Salzer said, and how “it has relevance to the field I want to study, so it’s sort of why I did it, and I spent a lot of time just sort of mapping out processes that the university has to go through to establish agreements and linkages with other schools to help get students over and keep students over here.”
In addition to the final posters, students are required to complete a minimum of 90 hours of their internship, write a research paper to be published in Investigations, the EEE internship publication, and present to the class about their experience. As RBHS EEE teacher and director of the Internships class, Kathryn Fishman-Weaver believes the showcase is an essential aspect of the class.
“I love that we have an authentic showcase at the end not unlike what the students will experience in Graduate school, so students are presenting high level work to a varied audience,” Fishman-Weaver said. “So there’ll be some professors in the audience who know exactly the chemistry that the kids are talking about, and there’ll also be high school students and English teachers who might not know all that chemistry, so students get to practice how they translate their work to different audiences, and that’s a really valuable skill that there aren’t always a lot of opportunities to practice otherwise.”
Along with the skills practiced during the showcase, the internship experience in general provides students with a hands on learning, Fishman-Weaver said. Though there are only 25 students in the class now, she believes all students at RBHS can benefit from the internship experience.
“Students gain so much from this experience,” Fishman-Weaver said “They gain the professional skill, … [and] a lot of confidence, so I see students become more poised during the class. I see students becoming more courageous in speaking to high level folks, to professors, to senators, to presidents of agencies, directors of agencies, and that’s really rewarding as a teacher to get to see students become young adults in that way … I would love to see all high school students have an experience like this, where they get to go into a field and try it out.”
By Ashleigh Atasoy
