Each year during the rainy season in the mountains of Bolivia, kids that attend school in the rural community of Japo must swim across a flooding river to get to class. Engineers in Action (EIA) serves communities across Bolivia, like Japo, where rivers become dangerous or impossible to pass, making education, healthcare, and markets inaccessible. By pairing college students with bridge projects in these towns, EIA facilitates both sustainable international development and technical and social learning opportunities for… read more about Sarah Bailey '24 - Duke Engineers for International Development »
This summer I had the opportunity to continue my research in the Becker Lab for Functional Biomaterials through the Duke University Chemistry Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship and SPIRE. Starting in January I shadowed and worked in the Becker lab, but had not yet been able to begin an official independent study or spend extended time in the facility. Dr. Becker offered for me to continue working with him and begin my own research project but was not able to provide a paid position. Through application guidance from… read more about Anna Davis '23 - Chemistry Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship »
After a year and a half of online classes, a virtual high school graduation, a virtual convocation and orientation at university and only interacting with others virtually, I was skeptical about doing a 9-week internship remotely. With zoom fatigue and social isolation setting in, I expected long workdays filled with socially awkward meetings where we would hide behind muted mics and turned-off cameras. However, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this internship would not be what I expected. The InStep Global… read more about Sharan Sokhi '24 - Cybersecurity Internship at Infosys Limited »
With the use of SPIRE enrichment funds, I was able to purchase documentary equipment that I used to collect archival-quality interviews and oral histories beginning in the summer and continuing through this academic year. This work, which was conducted for my senior thesis in cultural anthropology, concerns questions of race, place, land, and inequality, particularly as they pertain to my family’s farm in rural Alabama. Thanks to the SPIRE enrichment funds, I am able to continue engaging with the data that I collected even… read more about Lucas Lynn '22 - Research for Senior Thesis in Cultural Anthropology »
This summer, I interned as a Global Markets Summer Analyst within the Sales & Trading division at Credit Suisse. My internship was ten weeks long with the first 8 weeks being virtual and the last two weeks being in-person in New York. It was an excellent opportunity to seek an intersection between my passion for finance, strategy, innovation, and analytics. The rotational nature of the internship allowed me to spend three weeks each on Global Execution Services, Global Credit Products, and Equity Derivatives. I… read more about Priya Parkash '22 - Credit Suisse Global Markets Summer Analyst »
I worked in the Haravifard Lab at Duke University this past summer. This physics lab, run by Duke professor Sara Haravifard, mainly focuses on the behaviors of quantum materials. We synthesize and analyze these materials for properties of special physical phenomena, such as superconductors. As an undergraduate researcher in the lab, I was tasked with beginning a project to create eight new materials. I also would help attend to lab maintenance, such as organizing and labeling chemicals in the lab. The entire process for a… read more about Riley Fisher '23 - Undergrad Researcher in Haravifard Lab »
Robotic Arm Control Through Algorithmic Neural Decoding and Augmented Reality Object Detection A brain-machine interface (BMI) is a device that uses neurally implanted sensors to translate brain neuron activity into commands capable of controlling external software or hardware, such as a computer or robotic arm. BMIs are often used as assistive living devices for individuals with motor, sensory, and/or verbal impairments. They can also restore more independence than voice-controlled prosthetics by eliminating the… read more about Sydney Hunt '23 - WAVE Fellow in Dr. Richard Andersen's Lab at Caltech »
This summer of 2021, I interned at Cook Medical as a quality engineer. The internship was remote, as were several things this summer due to COVID, but I am glad to say that it was an amazing experience, and I learned a lot. Cook is a family-owned medical devices company based in Bloomington, Indiana, and even though I was interning remotely in Raleigh, I was able to make connections that I will value for a long time to come. What I did this summer as a quality engineer at Cook: I was part of… read more about Simran Sokhi '22 - Summer Internship at Cook Medical »
This past summer, I utilized the SPIRE enrichment experience to intern for a company called Frontier Tower Associates. It is a telecom tower company centered in the Philippines with smaller operations in various Asian countries. I worked as a financial analyst, doing work like investment banking, as all my superiors had experience in that realm. At a large investment bank: technology, media, and telecom (TMT) is a business unit and I worked for a firm in which a bank would help grow their business. I worked on… read more about Qaiser Mahmood '21 - Financial Analyst Internship (Summer 2020) »
With SPIRE’s enrichment funds, I was able to spend my summer interning remotely with Advance Access & Delivery (AA&D), a global health non-profit focused on tuberculosis (TB) interventions. As the Health Policy and Writing Intern, I had the opportunity to tell stories for the Zero TB Initiative. One examples includes writing about how AA&D’s partnerships in Karachi, Pakistan leveraged existing TB-screening mobile X-ray vans to jointly diagnose TB and COVID-19 to help overwhelmed hospitals triage potentially… read more about Yuexuan Chen '21 - Advance Access & Delivery Internship »
I worked as an investment banking summer analyst for Rothschild & Co. What separated this internship from any other is that I was offered this position, reserved exclusively for rising-seniors, as only a rising junior—owing to the firm’s interest keeping me on board long-term: in fact, I was the only such intern at Rothschild in at least North America, if not the world. I worked on various projects ranging from a live deal, to constructing pitch decks, to managing a deal’s two-party database of confidential documents.… read more about George Sanchez '22 - Investment Banking & Venture Capital Analyst Internships (Summer 2020) »
This past school year, I used my enrichment funds to participate in the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Nationals Conference this past March! Through SPIRE, I was able to attend the conference and gain exposure to not only new peers studying similar disciplines in STEM to my own majors of Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science, but also industry members and potential mentors that attended the conference as a means of recruiting for internship positions! Walking away from the conference with an expanded… read more about Mimi Larrieux '22 - NSBE Conference (Spring 2020) »
I just attended my first Grace Hopper Conference, and I’ve never felt more inspired to continue in the computer science field. But truth be told, I haven’t always felt this way. Last year, when I was rushing Catalyst, Duke’s technology community, I couldn’t help but compare my own classes and intellect to the accomplished males who were also rushing. I couldn’t help but feel small in my computer science classes. So hearing a female engineer’s at first uncertain, then successful transition from being a new-grad into full-… read more about Natalie Tarn '22 - Grace Hopper Conference (Fall 2020) »
This summer I utilized SPIRE funds as well as a physics research fellowship to work on a high energy physics research project. The ATLAS experiment at CERN aims to find new physics by analyzing data from high energy proton-proton collisions. These collisions are observed via a shower of particles called a jet. One of the ways this is done is by “tagging” known jets that come from certain particles (such as quarks and gluons) in order to isolate abnormal jets. I have been working on creating an untrained jet tagger that uses… read more about Elliott Kauffman '22 - High Energy Physics Research Project (Summer 2020) »
This summer, I had the opportunity to work for Clark Construction, a general contractor in DC. I spent the month of June working remotely from my home in Maryland. During the month of July, I was able to come to work in DC. During my time at Clark, I was able to work with the sustainability department in order to do materials tracking for a $300M surgical pavilion to be opened in 2023. In addition, I was able to perform some work tracking volatile organic compounds to be used inside the structure. LEED requirements are a… read more about Kemunto Okindo '21 - Clark Construction General Contractor (Summer 2020) »
This summer, I interned with Duke Management Company, which manages the University’s 8.6-billion-dollar endowment, as a part of the Data+ program. We explored how artificial intelligence can be used to support the investment office and developed a cost optimization tool for financing charges paid to prime brokers. For the latter half of summer, I worked closely with the Private Investments team and analyzed DUMAC’s venture capital investments from the last 20 years. I also spent my summer conducting research about… read more about Priya Parkash '22 - Duke Management Company Internship & Research (Summer 2020) »
This summer, I took a Duke ECE course in mobile app development and also had an internship through the Duke Phoenix Project where I was also doing mobile app development. In order to develop mobile iOS applications, I had to develop them on a mac, so I used my enrichment funds to purchase one. Through the mobile app development course, I built a few apps in Swift that were largely centered around schedule/database management and ran on both iOS and watchOS. It was a very fun course and I got to learn a lot about… read more about Michael Williams '21 - Duke Phoenix Project Internship (Summer 2020) »
My last memory of Duke right before all campus activities shut down and students returned home is a happy one. I was spending Spring Break with my fellow Spring Breakthrough Participants and we were having the most wonderful time volunteering at the puppy kindergarten, learning about canine cognition with Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, and even visiting a goat farm and the NC Zoo. The pandemic that created chaos across the world put me in an initial state of despair, confusion and hopelessness when I realized that the… read more about Simran Sokhi ’22 – Research Internship at Duke-NUS, Singapore (Summer 2020) »
This summer, I had an amazing opportunity to work as an intern for the National Weather Service through NOAA. During my 10-week internship, I conducted my own research project under the guidance of the amazing Dr. Peter Roohr and Wendy Marie Thomas. This research worked to evaluate the role of satellite imagery in the forecasting and operational decisions of wildfires, and the project was conducted as a case study into the 2019 Kincade blaze. As an individual studying decision science and applied mathematics through Duke’s… read more about Madeleine "Mac" Gagne' '21 - National Weather Service Internship (Summer 2020)) »
This summer, I had the opportunity to serve as a Product Management Intern for Equinix, which is a leading data center and colocation services company. My internship was remote due to COVID-19, and I was initially uncertain about how this experience would be, but it was great. I was mentored under a smart, patient, and caring team, and my role within product management helped confirm my interest in it. As a product management intern, my role involved: Coordinating approval from cross-functional teams to develop two new… read more about Avery Brown '21 - Internship at Equinix (Summer 2020) »
My freshman year self signed up for the Duke Computer Science Department to try and purchase an entrance ticket on my behalf, so that I could attend the Grace Hopper Celebration: a conference that includes workshops, speakers and a career fair for around 20,000 women in tech. That is right, 20,000 women. I was very lucky, and the CS Department was able to buy me a ticket to attend GHC 2018. My sophomore year self boarded a flight to Houston and checked herself into a hotel room that would soon be the site of hours of… read more about Isabel Shiff '21 - Grace Hopper Celebration 2018 »
Over this past summer, I decided that it was time for a change of pace with regards to research. Instead of working on epigenetic research, I decided to work on researching a putative HIV vaccine through the Azoitei lab at Duke University last summer. The work I did over the summer focused around creating a library of mutations for DH270, an antibody that has been implicated in a potential HIV vaccine. Essentially, when a patient with HIV undergoes somatic hypermutation, DH270 can undergo a series of mutations that… read more about Michael Williams '21 - Researching HIV Vaccine Through Duke's Azoitei Lab (Summer 2019) »
This summer I spent time abroad in Valparaíso, Chile, studying Spanish, living in a homestay, and learning about the local culture. During the second part of the summer I worked in Dr. Alison Adcock's cognitive neuroscience lab. I studied curiosity and how it relates to time. My tasks were to run participants through our study, involving the guessing of drawings, and then to write code to interpret the results. Computer science is a new skill for me, and this summer I spent a large amount of time aquatinting myself to… read more about Eleanor George '21 - Chile & Dr. Adcock's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab (Summer 2019) »
This summer I participated in the DOmath research program for 8 weeks this summer, for which SPIRE helped assist me in my housing expenses. I worked on a project entitled “Dynamics of Floating Plates on Thin Films” with another student, Daniel Hwang, under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas Witelski, Dr. Jeffrey Wong, and Jingzhen Hu. In our work we considered the problem of a rigid plate floating on a viscous fluid film down an inclined plane. Many similar problems have been previously investigated, because these problems have… read more about Elliott Kauffman '22 - Duke Opportunities in Mathematics (DOmath) Program (Summer 2019) »
This summer, I worked as a technician in my lab for the third summer. We analyzed samples collected in the field using methanol extraction, ethanol extraction, and radioimmunoassay techniques to learn more about thyroid and glucocorticoid hormone concentrations in yellow baboons. Outside of lab, I was able to take advantage of my time in Durham and explore downtown! From farmers markets and trivia to peach picking, my summer was a lot of fun as well as a great learning experience! read more about Georgia Young '20 - Amboseli Baboon Research Project (Summer 2019) »
This summer, from early June to the end of July, I traveled to South Africa with DukeEngage. For the first week my cohort and I visited Johannesburg, where we visited multiple museums and other important sites to immerse ourselves in South African history and culture. It was great to witness how the fight for freedom played out in the country and how South Africans are moving forward and still fighting for the things they love and are passionate about. Afterward, we traveled to Cape Town where I spent the remaining seven… read more about Melissa White '21 - South Africa with DukeEngage (Summer 2019) »
This past summer, I had the pleasure of being a Media Tech Intern at NBCUniversal. I was a broadcast engineer working within the Operations and Technology department. In particular, my team consisted of engineering architects, making us in charge of developing technologies that assisted the production, media, and distribution engineers. Because we served a variety of engineers, I split my time between interning at NBCU’s New York City, NY and Englewood Cliffs, NJ locations. This allowed me to see a broader picture of how… read more about Cyan DeVeaux '20 - Media Tech Intern at NBCUniversal (Summer 2019) »
This summer I spent six weeks in Berlin, Germany taking classes for summer session two and interning. The program in which I participated in was called Duke Middle East in Europe. Our coursework focused on analyzing the political debates about Islam in Europe and about refugees and immigrants from the Middle East. We focused a lot on the impact of the Turkish population and culture in Germany in order to investigate the shifting political landscape of Turkish-German identities. In addition to that, the we learned a lot… read more about Qaiser Mahmood '21 - Duke Middle East in Europe (Summer 2019) »
This year I was fortunate enough to attend the National Conference of Undergraduate Research (NCUR) at Kennesaw State University. At the conference, I was able to converse with other undergraduate researchers about studies from nearly every discipline, from linguistic studies to cancer biology. Moreover, I was able to attend talks by various undergraduates on a wide variety of subjects. A few of my favorites include a discussion about the Drake Equation and its applications to biology, a lecture comparing musical techniques… read more about Emma Glenn '21 - 2019 National Conference of Undergraduate Research (NCUR) & Australia »
This past Spring (from April 10- 13), I had the opportunity to attend the 2019 National Council on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) conference in Atlanta, Georgia. I had this chance because of SPIRE funding. Through NCUR and SPIRE, I was able to present my research from the Boyce Lab on the "Role of SEC24 O-GlcNAcylation in COPII Trafficking". By showing my research, I was able to gain novel insights into my project through questions from faculty and peers from other institutions. Finally, I was able to see others… read more about Caitlin Lamb '21 - Presenting at the 2019 National Council on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) Conference »