Berkeley Lab Hosts Albany High Students on Job Shadow Day

Albany High School student Terence Sun (left) checks out the routers used to operate the Energy Sciences Network, a high-speed science network supporting Department of Energy researchers around the country: Explaining the equipment are Gopal Vaswani (center ) and John Christman, who hosted Terence on Job Shadow Day. Photo by Yeen Mankin

This year, Computing Sciences hosted six students, while other Lab organizations hosted another six. Two more students will visit the Lab on May 2.

"Job Shadow Day was such an insightful event for me; I was able to get a sense of what ESnet does, my mentor Gopal Vaswani was awesome, and I even got to take away new knowledge from the whole experience," said Terence Sun, who was interested in networking and web development and was hosted by Vaswani and John Christman. "The routing room is full of high-end machines with crazy wiring, handling input and output at 100 Gbps. Needless to say, I found Job Shadow Day as a great experience and it really broadened my scope for different jobs. I wish we had more opportunities similar to this."

Treva Obbard, who is interested in a writing career, met with Computing Sciences science writer Linda Vu and Paul Preuss, a writer in Public Affairs who has also authored 13 novels. Preuss gave Obbard a copy of one of his science fiction books, an area of particular interest to the her.

Albany High School Student Jeremy Juwono (left ) listens as Berkeley Lab's Tony Gonsalves describes equipment in the LOASIS laser lab. The group is using lasers to create a new generation of particle accelerators small enough to be used in hospitals and industry. Photo by Yeen Mankin

"Everyone I talked to was really nice, and they made their jobs sound fun and interesting," Obbard said. "I never really thought about science writing as a job before."

Other students and mentors at the Lab were:

• Astrophysicist Peter Nugent hosted Kelin Kurzer-Ogul
• Albany High students Jerry Wu, Yong Ren and Kamiah Dixson visited NERSC, where they were hosted by David Paul. They also spent time talking with Jack Deslippe, who has developed two mobile apps for NERSC users.
• Jeremy Juwono, who is interested in physics and lasers, was hosted by Tony Gonsalves of the LOASIS Group in AFRD.
• Sarita Ng, who indicated an interest in event planning, shadowed Jan Hennessey, head of Berkeley Lab Conference Services.
• Lab photographer Roy Kaltschmidt hosted Yingwen Zho.
• Kevin Sun and James Ren met with mentor Rueben Mendelsberg, who is working on the materials science of superconducting accelerator cavities.
• Andrea Saw shadowed mentor Paul Ridgway, who works in the BATT Fab Lab (Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies Fabrication Laboratory).

Albany High students get a look inside NERSC's data storage system. Photo by Steve Chan

On Wednesday, May 2, students Felix Yoon and Amy Xie will visit with mentor Ken Chow to learn more about engineering at the Advanced Light Source.

Computing Sciences Communications Manager Jon Bashor and EETD's Jonathan Slack, whose children attend Albany High, are parent volunteers on the school committee matching students and mentors for the event.