Now it is summer! The temperature in Hamburg is not really proving that, but the summer students are arriving! That is the final proof I needed to be convinced that we have now the “hot” season.
Each summer DESY offers physics undergraduate students the possibility to participate in the research activities of the laboratory. Interested student usually apply half a year in advance. The selected candidates join in the day-to-day work of research groups and have the opportunity to get an insight into our scientist life. While the work in the groups is the main activity, there is also a series of lectures related to the research done at DESY. The students are usually arriving around the middle of July. This year they will stay until September 10th. You can find summer programs like this at any larger institute in the world. More information on the DESY summer student program can be found here.
A summer program is a nice way to get students interested in working in our fields as we always have to make sure that there will be a next generation of particle physicists. I am supervising summer students since I am not a student anymore and I really enjoy it. All of them are highly motivated and are looking forward to the summer job. They bring new ideas and more life into the group. Not that it is boring the rest of the year, but the summers would get rather quiet without the students.
“My” summer students, Silvia and Jeanette, will be working with a Silicon strip telescope here at the DESY test beam. They have the whole summer time to do some modifications on the system, to take data and to analyze the data. A complete particle physics experiment in just three months! So there will be more to report on here in the blog.
