Maddie Hurwitz is something of a renaissance woman. An undergraduate student at Williams College, she is passionate about science, ensemble music, and equestrian sports. She also spent every summer from 2016–2018 at NCI at Frederick working on projects spanning immunity research, clinical medicine, and genetics.
Editor’s note: The following is a retrospective commentary on the Werner H. Kirsten Student Internship Program from a recent alumni.
Here I was, an 18-year-old student intern with a chance to interview a prominent research scientist and suddenly, face-to-face with her, I ran out of questions. Silence filled the room. Now what? My Urbana High School classes had not prepared me to answer that question. Well, they had not prepared me to interview a scientist, either.
“Here are lions.” This fanciful phrase for the unknown embellishes the blank areas of antiquated maps. Sometimes cartographers used the phrase “Terra Incognita” (“unknown land”) instead. Either way, the message was clear: we don’t know what’s beyond this point. The modern study of genetics is similar.
You probably receive a plethora of ads in your inbox that you delete before giving them a second thought. But if you take a closer look at some of them, you’ll discover that you’re passing up cookies, donuts, yoga, and fun Christmas and other events, among many other opportunities. That’s right—the Recreation and Welfare (R&W) Club, a group dedicated to the health and well-being of NCI at Frederick staff as well as the local community, hosts a variety of entertaining events.
When Jackie Stewart accepted her dream job with the Frederick National Laboratory’s Laboratory Animal Sciences Program last year, it wasn’t the first time she had set foot on the sprawling campus owned by NCI at Frederick, the national lab’s government sponsor and partner. Stewart had spent the 2007–2008 school year and every summer and winter from 2008–2011 as a student intern at the Frederick National Laboratory and NCI at Frederick.