It’s June and GLAS welcomes its six summer 2023 interns.
Four interns are from the University of Chicago. Two interns are high school seniors who have earned internships through their years of dedicated and steady work at GLAS.
Intern projects, include Dark Skies, the LENSS night sky study, the Stone Edge Observatory’s sky survey, data accessibility through sonification and the Geneva Lake Water Quality Project. “I’m just really excited about this summer,” said Kate Meredith, GLAS president and director. “I love it when the office is teeming with lots of projects.”
Earlier this spring, The UChicago provided GLAS with about 16 resumes of interested students. “We interviewed half of the people who applied. Mostly it was a matter of picking people who aligned well, people who could make a contribution to the office and people we thought we could make a contribution to their career trajectory, too,” Kate said. The two high school students will work on continuing projects and are funded through the community.
GLAS staff members Adam McCulloch and Emily Sisco reviewed the UChicago resumes and narrowed the field to eight. Kate, Emily and Adam then went to Chicago to interview eight candidates and selected the four intern finalists. “This is our first summer we’ve only had astrophysics students and it’s the only summer when we only had women, other than our high school interns,” Kate said. Selecting four astrophysics students was intentional. Having all women was serendipity, Kate said. “That was by chance, but once we saw it, we were very excited about it,” she said.
The UChicago interns are:
- Avery Metzcar of Celina, Ohio, is a rising fourth-year student majoring in Astrophysics with a minor in Religious Studies. She enjoys biking and going to museums in her free time. Avery is eager to work as a Stone Edge Observatory intern through GLAS and to learn more about data collection and calibration processes, as well as learning about GLAS’s mission. Avery found a passion in data science through her studies at UChicago and her internship and research experiences. Machine learning algorithms and their applications interest her.
- Olivia Boyd of New Orleans is a rising second year student who is studying Astrophysics, Environmental Science, and Art History. Last summer, she worked in a dark sky environment and saw the panoply of night-sky stars which, previously, had only existed in her imagination. Olivia wants more hands-on research experience this summer. She is thrilled to be working with GLAS because of GLAS’s accessibility mission. Everyone should have the opportunity to be inspired! When she’s not looking skywards (and sometimes when she is), Olivia competes for the UChicago Track Team, enjoys bananas, reads “useless things,” listens to NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” podcast and can otherwise be found doing something she probably shouldn’t be doing.
- Sydney Simon of Chicago is a rising second year student planning to major in Astrophysics with a minor in Molecular Engineering. In her free time, she enjoys reading, running to the lake and painting. This summer, she’ll be working as a Dark Skies intern. She wants to enhance her data analysis skills and to make contributions to local Dark Skies policy reform.
- Shiloh Miller of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is a rising second year student planning to major in Astrophysics and English. She joined GLAS as an accessibility intern, where she’ll work with a team to make astronomy a more inclusive discipline. Outside of school, she can be found climbing at the bouldering gym, reading a Neil Gaiman novel, or losing her third consecutive game of pool.
The high school interns are:
- Maire Lucero is a rising fourth year student at Badger High School. Maire came to GLAS three years ago with an interest in sonification, translating visual information into sounds and tones. Sonification would improve data accessibility in astronomy, sustainability, medical research, and other sciences. Maire said her summer project is to sonify data from HR diagrams, which track the properties of stars in their life cycles. She also enjoys writing creatively, persuasively, and informatively. She is a member of the National Honors Society, Forensics, FFA, and athletics.
- Dylan Hulke is a rising fourth year student at Williams Bay High School and has won awards as a member of the high school academic bowl team. Dylan has been with GLAS since he was in seventh grade. He’s focused on GLAS’s LENSS project, particularly data collection and analysis. This summer he plans to continue his work on LENSS and GLAS’s Geneva Lake Water Quality Project.
The interns’ first day at the GLAS office was June 5. The end of the internships is flexible, but all of the internships are usually completed by the second week of August.
