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The goals of the education programs described below are not only to
produce more scientists and engineers, but also to assure that nonscientists are equipped
to deal with the scientific and technical issues facing our country. Given the importance
of issues such as health care and the environment, a well-informed and technically
literate citizenry is the best guarantee for a prosperous future.
We offer summer, fall, and spring positions for students. We also encourage faculty to spend a few months at Argonne
through the Faculty Participant program.
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| Student
Opportunities |
The Mathematics and Computer
Science (MCS) Division at Argonne National Laboratory,
in conjunction with Argonne's Division of Educational
Programs, conducts programs for undergraduate and graduate students majoring in computer science or
a related discipline. Every country’s most precious resource is its young people.
Students learn that the essence of science is not looking up answers or carrying out
recipe-style programming assignments, but solving problems that have never been
solved before. For this reason, the National Science Foundation and the Department
of Energy sponsor student research opportunities at colleges, universities, and
national laboratories.
The training of students to understand fundamental concepts of nature and to
solve difficult problems is one of basic science’s main contributions to society. For
example, Dr. Gibbons recently made these remarks about his graduate studies:
"Graduate school was a good place to learn how to define and solve problems, whether
theoretical or experimental. I didn’t realize it until later, but the skills and
sensitivities I developed in graduate school — learning how to ask questions and dig
for the answers, understanding which variables are important and which you can safely
ignore, the ‘sense of things’ you gain in hard science — are relevant not
only for basic research, but also for generic problem solving." |
