Graduate students reported that internships helped them establish ties to industry, gain new skills and kept them motivated. As one interviewee told Cao: “An internship may be one of the most useful classes you take in grad school.”Credit: Xu Liu
“It really helps them have a smoother transition to the real world,” adds Yang. It’s also a big draw for prospective students. Melissa Nakamoto, a fifth-year PhD student in the programme, says that the internship requirement was a big reason why she chose to apply. The pool of US PhD programmes that include internships remains small, but more could be on the horizon. Sara Wadia Fascetti, vice provost for the PhD network at Northeastern, says that since the university launched its internship programme in 2019, around half a dozen institutions have asked for advice on how to set up their own system.
One of them is Kristina Jarůšková. For her PhD research at the Czech Technical University in Prague, she works with technology companies IBM and Intel to simulate particle interactions inside CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. “Right now, private companies have the most resources in terms of data, people and computing,” she says.
For companies, sponsoring these joint projects can yield the benefit of eventually hiring CERN-trained students who are well versed in the firms’ culture and technology, for the small price of US$50,000–60,000 a year, he says. Both the lab and students have also reaped the rewards of these collaborations — including the development of CERN’s specialized software.