Monmouth University School of Science Students Intern Across the Country

Monmouth University School of Science students gained valuable work experience this summer interning at unique locations outside of New Jersey borders. The internship positions ranged from a business applications developer in Hershey, Pennsylvania, to a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at Oregon State University.

Jessica Kozma (Beachwood, NJ), mathematics and computer science major, interned at The Hershey Company where her responsibilities included altering existing web code to enhance the user experience in addition to creating her own code to fix any problems that were taking place. “I also analyzed information I collected regarding the online programs and came up with statistics on what the users’ opinions were and presented that to the lead developer,” said Kozma. “The job I performed required statistics knowledge as well as knowledge on different computer languages.”

Patrick Fedick (Passaic, NJ), chemistry major, participated in a 10 week summer research program through MassNanoTech at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The program included a $4000 stipend and ran from May 28 to August 3. “I worked in Dr. Richard Vachet's lab as well as spent a good amount of time in Dr. Vincent Rotello's lab,” said Fedick. “The title of my lecture presentation was ‘Using Mass Spectrometry to Monitor Nanoparticles in Complex Biological Systems’.” More information regarding this project can be found at: http://www.umass.edu/massnanotech/SURE_2013_projects.htm.

Justin Schlemm (Leonardo, NJ), software engineering major, worked with the Monmouth University Rapid Response Institute (RRI) as the team leader of a student Software Engineering team. His team would meet with Lockheed Martin representatives to report their progress and receive feedback on a regular basis. Upon completion, Schlemm and his team presented their project and experiences at Lockheed Martin's facility in Moorestown, NJ. “We worked over the summer using skills developed in our classes and many that we had to develop on our own to complete the task,” said Schlemm. “I was charged with the task of creating an adapter for Lockheed Martin's HLA (High-Level Architecture) RTI (Runtime Infrastructure) so that HLA messages from an external tool could be recorded and analyzed.”

Peter Chace (Brick, NJ), biology major specializing in marine and environmental biology, participated in an REU at Oregon State University funded by the National Science Foundation. “Specifically my project was measuring benthic respiration rates and nutrient inventories of Oregon continental shelf sediments,” said Chace. “I spent ten weeks in Newport, Oregon with nine other REU interns, each working under different researchers.”

For more information about internships at Monmouth University, visit http://www.monmouth.edu/academics/CSS/default.asp.