I recently was reminded of some work I did last year, and thought that it is the type of opportunity some LW-ers would be interested in, since there are a lot of STEM students on here.

The following are details about a research/scholarship opportunity. You must be a student, but you can be of any level: high school, college, grad school, or post-doc. You do not have to go to any specific school,  but you probably have to relocate to Dayton, OH for the 10 weeks of the summer program. You do not have to relocate for the rest of the year. 

They are very flexible on their admissions! GPA isn't high enough? Not a US citizen? Can't commit to the entire 10 weeks? They will still accept you if you turn in a good essay!

 

Basic Info

Website: http://wbi-icc.com/

5 minute video: http://vimeo.com/31103711 

Tec^Edge is a research opportunity/experiential learning scholarship that takes students  and puts them in groups with mentors from academia (such as professors with research projects), government (such as the Air Force Research Labs (AFRL)) and business (such as General Dynamics). 

Besides Tec^Edge, it also goes by: Academic Leadership Pipeline Scholarship (ALPS), Summer at the Edge (SATE), and Year at the Edge (YATE).

Summer At the Edge (SATE) is a 10-week program, and generally requires relocating for the summer to Dayton, OH, where the facility is. The work is full-time, though you make your own hours, and you get paid $4000 for the whole thing, generally in the form of a scholarship to your school (which means no taxes!). The facility is amazingly nice. Lots of high-tech things to work/play with.

It has been described as "Lock a bunch of smart people in a room with lots of gadgets, occasionally shove pizza under the door, and see what comes out."

Year at the Edge (YATE) is the "off-season". They ask for about 10 hours a week (so the scholarship is only $1000/10 weeks). But you do not have to be in Dayton. You can work from your school, but the occasional virtual meeting is required. For some reason, they were set on using Second Life instead of Skype for this, even though everyone disliked it. I am guessing it was for some sort of experiment..

There are lots of projects, and they try to put you on one that matches your interests. Many of the projects are sponsored by the Air Force Research Labs, so there are a lot involving sensors (aka surveillance) and aeronautics. Most projects need a lot of programming, most commonly in Java. But there are also opportunities for non-programmers (They are very big on inter-disciplinary work). Oftentimes you can request your own project, if there is something specific you want to work on. Anything that AFRL or DARPA might be interested in is generally accepted.

A sample project: One group was trying to develop a micro air vehicle that could be shot out of a rocket-launcher thing, so it had to roll up into a 2" diameter. It had to carry sensors (aka video feed), and it had to have a controlled descent. The whole thing had to cost less than $100 per unit, and their end of year test was to drop it from a height of perhaps 200' (I forget), use the video feed to find their mentor's truck, and use the controlled descent to land it in his truck bed. I don't know if they were successful in this... 

Besides getting to work on awesome projects, you also have a chance to meet and work under some pretty awesome people and network with contacts from various research labs. They are pretty willing to buy any expensive gadgetry required for your project. You can get your work published. You have lots of freedom as to what you want to do, how/when you want to do it. There are some really great presenters that they bring in too. All in all, it's a pretty awesome experience.

Downsides: The organization is what they call "Chaordic". There's not much of a hierarchy. You have to be ok pretty much making your own way. A lot of projects have some application to surveillance, so you have to be ok with that. Most LW-ers would have to relocate for the summer program. I think they help out with this, but all the same, Dayton is not the most interesting city to be in.

 

My experiences: 

For Summer At the Edge (SATE) I was teamed with a post-doc in some sort of computer science, and a 17 year-old programmer from a local high school. We were working on a project from the Human Performance Wing of the AFRL. The whole of our instruction was "Do something with Information Visualization, and Computer Mediated Communications." In other words, ways to make pretty pictures out of things like email, chat rooms, blogs, etc, so that people can understand them faster or see patterns easier.

 Some of the groups were very organized under their mentor who had a specific project that they were working on, and so would tell students what they wanted done. Our group was very self-led. Our mentor would ask us if we needed anything, but pretty much would leave us to our own devices.

We did some research for about a week, then my partners started working on programming text analyzers. Not being a programmer, I had to find other things to do. Not knowing what to do, I spent a lot of time doing the paperwork and giving presentations, organizing the SATE trip to an amusement park, and generally helping out.

One thing about SATE is that you have to be very self-motivated. If you don't have something to do, it is up to you to find something. Because it's so self-led, there's a decent amount of updates you have to give (such as a weekly email about what you accomplished that week, and how many hours you worked), and also a paper that you have to submit at the end, summarizing your findings.

Every now and then I'd have an idea. There were a lot of dead ends, but eventually I managed to coalesce my ideas into somewhat of a whole. I probably spent about a month working on my actual project, and then about a week writing my paper, and some of my teammates' paper. Both of our papers ended up getting published in the Collaborative Technologies and Systems International Symposium. If I had still been a student when the conference occurred, Tec^Edge would have paid my way for me to present the poster at the conference, but as it stood, our adviser presented for me.

 

After SATE was over, I applied for Year at the Edge (YATE). This program only requires ~10 hours a week, since it is during the school year, and allows you to work from home/school. For this project there was even less instruction, as I had to propose my own project. If you can manage to turn a class assignment into something YATE is interested in, they are quite accepting of it.

I had a pretty open-ended project for a Computer Design class, so I asked my partner in that class if she would be willing to do a project on something called Computer Supported Collaborative Work (aka "Using computers to work together with other people"), and I proposed the same project to YATE. They all agreed, so for all intents and purposes I ended up getting a research scholarship to do my homework!

This time there was a bit more structure, as we were following the class guidelines as to what we needed to accomplish. Mainly we were doing quantitative and qualitative measurements on collaborating using Google docs, versus other collaborative methods (being in the same room and sharing a computer). Being a much smaller project, this didn't get published, but we did get an A on the assignment, and used the paper-writing as an excuse to learn LaTeX.

Unfortunately, that was my last quarter before my divorce, so I didn't continue with the program. But I couldn't recommend it more to anyone who is interested. You get a lot of opportunities to work on whatever interests you. The mentors are amazing contacts from many different research companies that you can use as references. It's not uncommon to get offered a job or internship with the company that is mentoring your project. Also, even if you are a high schooler or an undergrad, you have the opportunity to get published.

 

Want to Apply?

This website has application instructions and a short video: http://wbi-icc.com/who-we-work-with/students-teachers 

Things they like: Passion, Willingness to venture into the unknown, Willingness to "fail" (allowing discovery of things that don't work), Interdisciplinary work and knowledge, Desire to make a difference

My admissions essay earned me a spot as a "Student Leader" and I'm willing to post it, if it will help people see the sort of thing that they are looking for. But I won't bother, if no one asks!

If you have any questions about it, let me know!