High school grads experiment with science
at the Applied Research Labs

The High School Apprentice Program at the Applied Research Laboratories at The University of Texas provides an early taste of science and engineering for students entering their freshman year of college.

The students get experience with research projects designed by ARL research scientists, who are their mentors for the summer. The projects deliver real results that the ARL researchers will use in their work.

Tejas Ghadia, a participant in ARL’s apprentice program, helped Dr. Nicholas Chotiros prepare an experiment about sound propagation in ocean sediment. Here, Ghadia, who will major in petroleum engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, adjusts sound instruments in a tank at ARL.

Students in the program this summer compared sets of data about the Earth’s ionosphere, developed a Web site following accessibility guidelines, extracted sound from a 30-year-old tape recording of the deep ocean and worked on a way to keep classified information from leaving its organization.

Their projects reflect the full spectrum of research at ARL, a major research unit of the university. It does basic and applied research in acoustics, electromagnetics and information sciences. The Department of Defense is the major sponsor of research at ARL, which dates to 1946.

The ARL program is one of several at the university that aim to engage students in science, technology and engineering early in their academic careers. Other programs are in earth sciences, natural sciences and engineering.

Most of the students in the program’s 25 years have come from central Texas high schools and have attended The University of Texas at Austin.

They apply to the program through their high schools in the spring. ARL relies on guidance counselors and science teachers to spread the word.

“Get out of the way”

Jack Shooter, a senior research scientist at ARL, has been a mentor for several years and enjoys it.

“It’s fun to work with smart people,” he said of the students. “We just point them in a direction and get out of the way. If we didn’t, we’d get run over.”

Shooter and Walter Hinds, his apprentice, are working to get good audio from 30-year-old reel-to-reel tapes that contain sounds from the deep ocean and deliver digitized recordings to the U.S. Navy. The process involves baking the tapes in an oven at 125 degrees over four or five days to get out the moisture that accumulated over the past three decades.

Dr. Laura Faulkner, a research associate who studies usability in ARL’s Information Systems Laboratory, said the program helps participants learn that much of scientific research requires a lot of hard work.

Shooter said he wants Hinds, “to touch everything in the process. We want to cram as much into him as we can by the end of the month.”

That, Shooter said, means that Hinds “can thread this machine, he can clean the tapes, he can bake the tapes, he can work on these (software) programs.”

Hinds, a graduate of Pflugerville High School, intends to major in biomedical engineering at Cornell University.

Dr. Cheryl Martin, a research scientist in ARL’s cyber information assurance area, said her apprentice, Sharon Tam, is doing graduate student-level work.

“This is something that she would be exposed to, not in an undergraduate class, but a graduate-level class in data mining,” Martin said. “She is maybe not getting as deep into the theory, but she is getting into everything about how it applies and what you’re looking for and how to understand when you get results.”

Tam, a Westwood High school graduate, is devising rules to help identify when an attempt is made to send information an organization doesn’t want to be sent out such as classified information in a government agency.

Because she can’t use classified documents, Tam is going through 32 news stories about terrorism in the Mideast, and analyzing them paragraph by paragraph, looking for words and phrases she thinks would denote classified information.

Tam, who plans to major in computer science at MIT, said that she’s learning a lot about computer science and likes the process.

Martin said Tam’s work should be useful developing rules and decision support and artificial intelligence methods for dealing with what she calls “exfiltrated” data.

Welcome to research

David Westwood, who attends Tufts University, worked with Faulkner to test the value of accessibility standards in Web site design.

During the summer, the students discover the thrill of scientific discovery and what sometimes is the drudgery of getting to the point of discovery.

“One of the phrases we utter a lot with the students is, ‘Welcome to the wonderful world of research,’” said Dr. Laura Faulkner, a research associate who studies usability in ARL’s Information Systems Laboratory. “Because they find out that a lot of it is just hard work. It’s slogging through scheduling and figuring this out and writing that down.”

David Westwood, a Westwood High School graduate headed to Tufts University, is working with Faulkner to design a Web site using accessibility standards for Web users with disabilities. The goal is to see whether such a Web site would benefit users who aren’t disabled. They also are working with Dr. Kay Lewis of the university’s Accessibility Institute.

Faulkner said the apprentice program makes the mentors think creatively in devising research projects that can provide results in two and a half months.

And in the apprentice program, results count. The students write reports (their first scientific paper, in many cases) and make a poster presentation. The posters are judged by university faculty in a program at the Commons Building of the J.J. Pickle Research Campus.

A part of the organization

Elaine Sedenberg worked with Dr. Trevor Hoffman in a study of the ionosphere during the apprentice program. Sedenberg, who is interested in medical-related studies at The University of Texas at Austin, said the program helped broaden her skills.

During the summer, the students are like most other ARL workers. They get an employee badge and can walk the fluorescently lit halls that run through the one-story buildings and check out the scientific posters detailing research projects.

“They really disappear into the organization,” said Dr. Mike Pestorius, who oversees the program. “You see them the first day and they don’t look much different—we have a pretty young work force out here and a lot of students. You give them a problem and off they go.”

The problems aren’t always in what the student intends to study at their university.

Elaine Sedenberg, a McNeil High School graduate, wants to go into medical research at The University of Texas at Austin, but at ARL she’s working with data about the ionosphere for Dr. Trevor Garner, a research associate.

That’s OK with her.

“I really feel that this has been an opportunity to explore a different field and not only show me what it’s like to work in a scientific environment, interacting with other peers,” she said. “It’s given me the opportunity to develop a different set of strengths that I think I can take different aspects of my job here and apply it to whatever else I decide to do. It’s taught me skills in that area and it’s developed my knowledge in science a lot more.”

Contact Christy Habecker, ARL’s education programs coordinator, at 512-835-3667 or habecker@arlut.utexas.edu about the ARL High School Apprentice Program.