My Personal Experience as a SULI intern
In Summer 2023, I was selected for the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). SULI is a 10-week paid summer internship at a national laboratory in the US offered by the Department of Energy (DOE) to encourage research internships for undergraduate students. To participate in this, I traveled to California from India, during the summer break before my senior year of undergraduate studies.
It felt surreal to play a small part in doing important research alongside scientists in the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area. During the internship, I was assigned a desk in building 85B and I took the lab shuttle to work there from 9-5 throughout the week. Berkeley Lab is situated in a hilly region above the UC Berkeley campus. The scenery during the shuttle ride to the top of the hill (sometimes including deer sightings), and the breathtaking view of the bay from the top was something I looked forward to every day. Everyone at the lab, including program staff, scientists, and fellow interns, was friendly, collaborative, and approachable, which made the entire internship even more memorable.
The internship was memorable in many ways - it marked my first exposure to technical research. It was also the first time I, as a computer science major, learned about ecology and environmental sciences. It felt like a breath of fresh air to think about concepts outside programming languages and data structures! This was where I was introduced to remote sensing, microbial traits and biogeochemical processes. My learning didn't stop with just the ecology side of things; I also learnt about interpretable AI and conducted experiments using SHAP and LIME to study feature importance. Looking back, working on this project gave me a holistic view of applied machine learning and a glimpse into what it would feel like to pursue interdisciplinary research as a career path.
I'd encourage any undergrads and recent graduates curious about research to apply to the SULI program. It might change the trajectory of your career - it certainly did for me, and I'm so grateful to have experienced it. I made some lifelong friends and am lucky to have mentors I'm still connected with.