Summer Science Internships

Celebrating Nearly Two Decades of Experiential Learning

BACK IN THE SUMMER OF 2016, Nazeli Hagen ’17 served as an intern at Jackpine Technologies in Maynard, as part of the Rivers Summer Science Internship program. A rising senior at Rivers, Hagen had a strong interest in software and programming: “My junior year, I took AP computer science with Mr. Schlenker, and I fell in love with it within the first week. I knew it was what I wanted to do.” Today, after earning a degree in computer science and gender studies at Harvard, she has reached that goal: Hagen is working as a software engineer in San Francisco.

Charlie Watkins ’16 spent the summer between his Rivers junior and senior years interning at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, working in a medical robotics lab. “I had a great experience, and it did have an effect on my future,” says Watkins today. He went on to study robotics at Johns Hopkins (under the guidance of his mentor at the Brigham), and he now works as an engineer, helping to develop medical devices.

While not every participant can draw a straight line from their summer experience to their college and career choices, the summer science internship program— a signature Rivers initiative now heading into its 18th year— has been an extraordinary success by any measure.

It has grown from placing five or six students a year to offering some 24 internships this past summer, with students serving in a wide range of STEM-related fields, from engineering to medicine to research to software to robotics and more. Interested students must go through a rigorous selection process; if chosen, they are paired with a placement that matches their interests. And thanks to the generosity of supportive donors, the internships now provide a stipend, making it a more viable option for students who want or need to take on a paying job over the summer.

“Having that experience,” says Hagen, “helped me know that I wanted to learn more about being a software engineer.”

Science and Substance

Michael Schlenker P’25, ’26, the faculty member whose class inspired Hagen to pursue computer science, is now coordinator of the program. “When I arrived at Rivers, 14 years ago, the science internships were run by Kim Koppelman, who worked with [then head of school] Tom Olverson to make this a big deal,” Schlenker recalls. What that meant, says Schlenker, was that interns would perform “important, high-end research working in real labs, at companies doing real science.”

“There were five students per year,” he continues, “and the goal was six to eight weeks, half time to full time, per summer. At the end, in the fall, each kid did a 20- to 30-minute symposium. We’d order pizza, and it would be really in-depth.” As the program grew, he says, those in-depth sessions became challenging to schedule, and the format was switched to a single all-school meeting at which all the interns make a presentation about their experiences. “But we still wanted the program to be a big deal; Tom wanted it to be something the school really supports and gets behind. I inherited that,” says Schlenker.

If interest and participation are any measure, the program is, if anything, a bigger deal today than ever. At the most recent fall all-school meeting where interns reported out, 24 students described their stints at 15 sites (some sites hosted more than one intern).

Long before they reach that point, however, they all go through an extensive application process over the previous winter. Explains Schlenker, “They have to write a cover letter. They have to write a one- or two-page essay on why they like science and what interests them. They have to sit for a formal, professional interview with me.”

Part of the reason for this in-depth process is to assess the students’ interests, the better to match them with a suitable internship. “There’s real value when the internship has a 100 percent overlap with what you might be interested in pursuing,” says Schlenker, noting that this year, there were several new internship opportunities for students. But, he adds, “There’s also a decent amount of value if you know you’re not going into the thing the internship is about. There’s value in learning how a business works, how a hospital works, whether you like big teams or detailed scientific work, whether you like medicine, whether you like surgery, how real scientists approach a program, how to manage accountability, and so on.”

He also sees opportunity, he says, in the more humbling aspects of internships. “I give the students a pep talk every year, telling them that at Rivers, they are the focus of what most people are doing on this campus,” he says. “When they start at the internship, they are not the focus. They are at the bottom. They’re trying to find a way to add value.”

The experiences are as varied as the students and their interests. At the October assembly, Abby Matsuyasu ’23 and Jacob Sardinha ’23 described working at the Burns Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, where zebrafish are bred to model human cardiovascular disease; the students helped breed the fish, using intentional genetic mutations to study cardiovascular defects. Jackie Lee ’23 interned at a busy pediatrics practice in Brockton, shadowing doctors and assisting with young patients; a highlight was removing a suture. Grace Brosnan ’23 sat in on some 900 clinical appointments during her stint working with an orthopedic surgeon at Boston Medical Center. Eli Helzberg ’23 worked with Klett Consulting Group (run by Mark Klett ’71) to research solar technologies, write a white paper, and create a social media campaign and marketing strategy around the company’s solar streetlight product. Without question, the internships provide real, substantive experience, as Tom Olverson envisioned; no one spent the summer fetching coffee and filing.

Growing Support, Expanding Access

A key factor in the program’s expansion has been the financial support that allows students to receive stipends. “That has really helped the program,” says Schlenker. “If kids are deciding between ‘I have to make money’ and ‘I want to do the internship program’—now, they don’t have to make that choice.” When the internships began offering a stipend, he says, interest in the program skyrocketed and the number of interns nearly doubled.

Chris Ehrlich ’88 was one of the key contributors to the fund that makes the stipends possible. Today, he works in biotech venture capital, as CEO of Phoenix Biotech Acquisition Corporation—an irony, he says, because “the two things I was worst at in high school were math and science.” Nonetheless, he had his reasons for supporting the Summer Science Internship program, as he explained recently.

Ehrlich comes from a family engaged in the life sciences—his father was a doctor and his brother is a lawyer who runs a life science practice—and both parents, he says, were “huge Rivers fans.” A few years back, as his father underwent a final illness, Ehrlich pondered ways in which his parents could be memorialized through philanthropy. “I wanted my gift to be put to a practical use, and I thought long and hard about it,” says Ehrlich. At around that time, he was approached about making a gift to Rivers, and he began talking to Schlenker about the internship program.

“If I’m into biotech, and I give talks about taking risks, how about if I put my money where my mouth is?” says Ehrlich. “Life sciences and Rivers are a great combination.”

That was in 2019, and while Covid put a slight crimp in the internship program—the summer 2020 placements were all done in a remote format—the gift, and others like it, have boosted the program to a new level of success. Ehrlich is thrilled to see the growth: “What could be better than supporting kids at the school where I was supported? It’s been more successful than I could have imagined, and it’s an awesome legacy for my family.”

Learning by Doing

For former interns like Hagen and Watkins, who are pursuing careers in STEM fields, the value of the program is incalculable. But even younger alumni who are still charting their professional course were excited and inspired by the experience. Keira Thompson ’22, now studying at Northwestern University, says that shadowing an orthopedic surgeon at Boston Medical Center during the summer of 2021 was “incredible.”

“I learned so much,” says Thompson. “I got to see how Dr. Stein didn’t just address the orthopedics case at hand but really addressed the whole patient. And it was really special to work at a hospital that has a unique mission, given that it’s a ‘safety net hospital.’” Speaking during her senior year at Rivers, Thompson said, “You can think about medical care in the abstract, but seeing what the day-to-day is like, and the ins and outs of patient care, is really helpful in figuring out my future path”— a path, she said, that could include medical school or biotech. “I love how science can translate into human impact, and I want to have an impact.”

Anna Monaghan ’22 says her summer stint at Brooks Automation was “so cool.” The robotics enthusiast, now in her first year at Bowdoin College, says “I was mostly doing NCs—nonconformances—all the little pieces and parts of different robots that didn’t work. We would take the part we were given and figure out what was wrong with it.” She says she did about 1,000 NCs over the course of a five-week internship—more substantive work than she expected from a summer job. And while she’s not sure what she might pursue in college (“I’d say robotics and computer science are up there”), the lessons she learned at Brooks would be useful in any professional field: “I learned how to be super thorough, and the importance of always doing your best work. I also feel like I learned a lot about the engineering and robotics industry, and it gave me an appreciation for automated things we use every day.”

Many former interns report that one of the most valuable aspects of the experience was simply exposure to a professional environment. “I think I had no idea what certain jobs looked like, what the day-to-day is,” says Hagen. “Just to be able to see what people were doing and what the process was enables you to imagine yourself doing it.”

A Two-Way Street

An ongoing challenge, says Schlenker, is lining up a sufficient number of appropriate internships in suitable fields each summer. While many companies and organizations have offered spots to Rivers students for several years, the need continues to grow, along with the program. “It’s an amazing part of the Rivers community that helps us find new internships each year,” says Schlenker. Parents, alumni, faculty members, and friends in STEM fields—all have stepped up to help connect students with meaningful summer placements.

And the benefits, points out Schlenker, accrue to both students and hosts. “A great piece of the program is the feedback I get from the hosts at the end of the internships. They are always so impressed with our students,” he says. “They may start out with reservations about the maturity and skills of a high school student, but I’m always blown away by what I hear. ‘The person fit right in. They were really helpful, and they added value.’ ”