The Moncrief Undergraduate Summer Internship Program provides opportunities for undergraduate students of mathematics, science, and engineering to work with faculty, postdocs, and graduate students at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Interns perform research in one of the Institute's Centers or Groups on a wide range of computational research topics - in fields spanning the environment to nanomanufacturing.
Veterans of the Moncrief internship, Jennifer Zvonek and Robert Stephany, are now PhD students together at Cornell. We sat down to ask them about their experiences.
“I started at UT as a mechanical engineering major, but in my first year I found an interest in physics,” said Robert. “Then I learned about this new undergraduate degree program called computational engineering, and that seemed really interesting to me. So, I switched my major over to computational engineering and physics. But then I took a lot of math classes and got really interested in math, and at one point, I realized, ‘Oh, my goodness, I'm in three different degrees. What the heck am I doing with my life? What do I want to do?’
Robert noticed how every math professor whose class he enjoyed was in the Oden Institute.
“Without failure. Every single one. And that was when I thought, ‘Huh. Maybe this is what I want to do,’” Robert recalled with a laugh.
“Dr. Irene M. Gamba was one of the major influences. I took a partial differential equations course with Dr. Gamba and she was the one who told me about the Moncrief Internship and pushed me to apply. She was an important mentor for me as I transitioned over to computational math.”
“The internship was my first real experience doing serious research, tackling a big challenging problem. My advisor that summer was Manuel Rausch. I remember when he told me the project he wanted me to work on. My first impression was: ‘That's a thing that can be done? How in the world am I going to do this?’ It felt like a Herculean task at first.”
Through Dr. Rausch's guidance, Robert accomplished much more than he had expected by the end of the summer - enough to yield an offer to continue working with Dr. Rausch and his research group for another year and a half.
“The summer internship was a pivotal moment in my academic career. It gave me a clear path forward. I’m at Cornell now, studying applied mathematics,” said Robert.