“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Students hear this question from a young age.
In the Bay Area, STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, is a prominent and growing collection of fields. This includes careers ranging from computer science to medical research.
Internships provide students who are unsure about their passions with potential career options. Conveniently, the Bay Area has an abundance of opportunities for students to explore STEM careers.
Junior Eric Gan spent his freshman and sophomore summers at Sarwal Lab at the University of California, San Francisco for an unpaid internship.
“[Sarwal Lab does] translational research, which means they study how you apply medical research to people,” Gan said. “There’s a clinical aspect and there’s research as well. They’re immunology and methodology based, so they’re looking at how the immune system changes when people undergo organ rejection and they’re trying to find ways to diagnose that early on, like personalized medicine.”
Gan recalled an average day interning at Sarwal Lab.
“Usually, samples came in the afternoon, so people would go to the blood labs and get their stuff done, and then only after that would we collect tubes. It was a daily process,” Gan said. “After that, maybe [from] two to around five or six, I would be doing sample processing the whole time. When there was free time, I would help out the lab manager with her [research]. That was when I did RNA extraction. We had lab meetings weekly, [and] most of the time I would sit in for those. It was always really interesting to hear people talk about their projects, because there were several going on at once.”
“I definitely found that doing internships and really keeping yourself open to seeing the realities is really important”
History teacher Heather Sadlon earned her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and her master’s degree in aerospace engineering. Sadlon had multiple internships while in college, which helped her gain exposure to the STEM workforce.
“My dad is an engineer [and that] got me kind of exposed to the field, even though to be honest, I knew he was an engineer, but I didn’t [one] hundred percent know what it meant to be an engineer,” Sadlon said. “When I went to college, I did internships and got involved in different types of careers. I worked for the Department of Transportation when I was an engineer. You just get exposed to more people. You get surrounded by people and I had a lot of friends who were doing different internships at other companies, so you just start to get exposure to think [of the] big variety of jobs that you can do as you get to the college level.”
Doctor Sharon Ann Hunt is a cardiology professor affiliated with Stanford University Medical Center and was one of seven female students in her class at Stanford in 1967. She recalls her own high school internship in Ohio.
“I was in a science fair in high school with a really dumb project and I won a prize, and the prize was to spend the summer in the downtown area [in] a place called the Cleveland Clinic, working in a medical research lab,” Hunt said. “I was delighted to do that and got really turned on to things that were going on there. I went to college after that and was kind of an apprentice to a scientist in college who was a plant physiologist. [Studying plant physiology] should have been what I was going to do with my life, [but] every summer I went back to the Cleveland Clinic, [I] got more and more turned on by medical research and ended up going to medical school [in Stanford] instead of getting a Ph.D. in plant physiology.”
“I think all students who are willing to work hard and need exposure to [internships]”
One of the more difficult aspects of finding an internship is outreach. But from networking, online programs to cold emailing, there are a multitude of ways one can apply for internships.
“If you’re looking for … internships via email, or any sort of a cold kind of thing, you want to do it early, and obviously the same thing applies for application based ones too, [around] the beginning of winter ideally,” Gan said. “I personally didn’t do that, but everybody says to do that, and I agree the earlier the better.”
When searching for a medical internship, Hunt underscores that there are difficulties, but opportunities are available.
“Just look around and apply. You can’t just call up someone like me or someone else and say you know, ‘I want to hang around with you’” Hunt said. “It won’t happen, especially in medicine [and if] that person’s life involves seeing patients. It’s illegal to do that without a lot of … paperwork. [Although] it can be done … it’s a big deal paperwork wise, so I would be on the lookout for any ads or notices … in the newspapers, school or … availability things that people post.”
Hunt emphasizes that finding an internship early poses many benefits.
“It’s really helpful to get a realistic look at what the life [of the career] might be like. You might do that, get into it, then decide: ‘Oh, I don’t want to do that,’” Hunt said. “But better to do that when you’re in high school or early college to figure it out [before] when you’ve already committed.”
Similarly, Sadlon believes that the importance of internships lies within the exposure received.
“The thing about internships is that it’s really impossible to know. You can take your classwork, [and] you can do well in your classes, which I think is sort of how I was like,” Sadlon said. “But then when it came to the actual day to day ‘What does it mean to be an engineer?’ and ‘What kind of skills am I going to be using?’ and ‘Is this something I’m really going to enjoy?’ I definitely found that doing internships and really keeping yourself open to seeing the realities is really, really important to that. I did some internships, but the problem with me is that I ignored all those kinds of signs, which [was] like, I don’t think I really enjoy this, or I’m noticing the people around me are really enjoying it. It just seems like a really good fit for them, but for me, it just really wasn’t. Unfortunately, it took me a long time to [find that out]. [It took] working in the field for me … and really trying a lot of things after I graduated as an engineer to really finally convince myself ‘Okay, I think maybe I made a mistake and this is not the field I want to go in.’”
When she was younger, Sadlon felt pressure to find a career in STEM.
“The thing that pushed me into [engineering] was not so much that I’m so thrilled and interested in science and tech–which is I think the reason it should push people in– it was more I went to a really small school [in a] small hometown,” Sadlon said. “Very few people have even left my [town] … and as a young woman, especially back [then], it was rare for young women to go into the STEM fields, and so, I definitely got a lot of positive encouragement from people around me and my teachers. Part of it was I didn’t want to let them down or admit [that] I [didn’t] really like it.”
Sadlon uses her experience to urge students to be aware of their own passions when finding a potential career.
“There’s this sense that STEM can be difficult, right? Definitely some of the classes were really, really challenging for me and some of them I did not do well in at all and there was definitely this sense [that] I didn’t want to leave the field. So I kind of over pushed myself to say, ‘I have to succeed and get through this,’ [and] I can’t use an excuse that I’m not really enjoying [it]. I doubted myself and said, ‘well, it doesn’t matter if you’re not enjoying it; you have to finish it,’ because at this point, I don’t want to be the young woman who quit. I cannot be that person. It just pushed me for years, like going to grad school, working, all this kind of stuff. But sometimes you have to go through that and you have to listen to yourself a little bit more like what is it that you actually like to do?”
Although STEM companies are prevalent in the Bay Area, Gan has different views about the effect of their presence on students.
“I don’t think it pressures them. I think there’s a certain degree of recruiting. I think Silicon Valley is one of those places where there’s so much out there for you that there’s no need to pressure people into doing it,” Gan said. “It’s just very natural for people to seek out those opportunities.”
Sadlon offers advice for students who want to learn about a potential field of work.
“I think one of the best things that I think I would do is try to find mentors that are really interested in teaching young people. Finding young engineers [or] young scientists that are not that far away from where you are in life right now, who had to make similar decisions about college, about internships, so that you can kind of pick their brains a little bit. [Basically,] people who are interested in helping other young people make decisions,” Sadlon said. “Around here, we’re really lucky. We have so many companies and universities and things like that. Look into universities and see what kind of programs they might have. I fill out a lot of recommendation forms for kids who want to do summer internships and stuff like that as juniors or even sophomores. I think all of that is a great experience and I think that [it] should not be reserved for just the top students in their class, either. I think that all students who are willing to work hard need exposure to those opportunities.”
