Hello! Has anyone sent a student to the Science Internship Program at UC Santa Cruz? My son has to decide between this and another opportunity (both in astronomy) in the next couple days, and he doesn’t have enough information to make a decision. He’s an out-of-state student, so he’d be residential seven days a week, and they’ve awarded him 100 percent financial aid, so cost isn’t an obstacle. He’s interested in knowing if it’s a worthwhile learning experience, if they’re organized, if the mentors are nice, etc. Many thanks for any info you could provide.
Hi, I participated in it last year, and I had a lot of fun. I would say that the program is whatever he makes of it. He’ll have to take a lot of initiative on his own if he wants to be as successful as possible. From my experience, I had a very passionate mentor so it was quite fun for me, and from what I heard, the astronomy mentors are possibly some of the best ones at SIP.
Thanks so much for your input! Their presentation said that they require the mentors to spend at least nine hours over three days a week with the interns, and the rest of the time the interns work together or independently. Is that about the amount of time your mentor spent with you, and how did it go the rest of the time? Did you work closely with the other interns, or were you mostly on your own?
I know that it was very different for a lot of groups, but for me, I would meet with my mentor every day for about 2-3 hours or so. So on average I spent about 12 hours a week with my mentor. I did not receive a lot of work to do outside of our meetings, just a couple of things here and there, so the workload was not too crazy; however, if that is something you were looking for, it is very easy to simply just ask your mentor for more things to do. For my project specifically (I was doing a CSE research track), I worked almost only with my other interns and rarely did stuff on my own, so it was a very collaborative environment.