January 27, 2022
The Moncrief Undergraduate Summer Internship Program provides opportunities for undergraduate students of mathematics, science, and engineering to work with faculty, postdocs, and graduate students at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Interns perform research in one of the Institute's Centers or Groups on a wide range of computational research topics in fields spanning the environment to nanomanufacturing.
Veterans of the Moncrief internship, and former computational engineering students Jennifer Zvonek and Robert Stephany, are now Ph.D. students together at Cornell. We sat down to ask them about their experiences.
“I started at UT as a mechanical engineering major, but in my first year I found an interest in physics,” said Stephany. “Then I learned about this new undergraduate degree program called computational engineering, and that seemed really interesting to me. So, I switched my major over to computational engineering and physics. But then I took a lot of math classes and got really interested in math, and at one point, I realized, ‘Oh, my goodness, I'm in three different degrees. What the heck am I doing with my life? What do I want to do?’
Stephany noticed how every math professor whose class he enjoyed was in the Oden Institute.
“Without failure. Every single one. And that was when I thought, ‘Huh. Maybe this is what I want to do,’” Stephany recalled with a laugh.
“Dr. Irene M. Gamba was one of the major influences. I took a partial differential equations course with Gamba and she was the one who told me about the Moncrief Internship and pushed me to apply. She was an important mentor for me as I transitioned over to computational math.”
“The internship was my first real experience doing serious research, tackling a big challenging problem. My advisor that summer was Dr. Manuel Rausch. I remember when he told me the project he wanted me to work on. My first impression was: ‘That's a thing that can be done? How in the world am I going to do this?’ It felt like a Herculean task at first.”
Through Rausch's guidance, Stephany accomplished much more than he had expected by the end of the summer – enough to yield an offer to continue working with Rausch and his research group for another year and a half.
“The summer internship was a pivotal moment in my academic career. It gave me a clear path forward. I’m at Cornell now, studying applied mathematics,” said Stephany.
Jennifer Zvonek, fellow Ph.D. student, also saw the mentorship that Oden Institute faculty gave her as one of the most important benefits of her experience in the Moncrief Summer Internship.
“I worked under Dr. Ufuk Topcu the summer before my junior year and my project was on active feature selection for reinforcement learning,” said Zvonek. “Before the Moncrief Summer Internship I hadn't done any research either.”
Thrown in at the deep end, this was Zvonek’s introduction to machine learning. Now, she works with numerical analysis and differential equations to conduct machine learning research at Cornell, and plans to enter industry after earning her doctorate in applied mathematics.
“Just talking to professors, being part of their research, and having connections within the Oden Institute was very nice. It helped me to understand more of what academia is like, because the internship essentially turns you into a grad student for a summer,” said Zvonek.
Once a week, Zvonek and her fellow Moncrief interns would meet with Dr. Robert van de Geijn and Dr. Maggie Myers to eat lunch and talk about their work.
“They called it Lunch Bunch,” recalled Zvonek. “That was really fun to talk with them and get to know people we weren't working with directly on the research. I’m secretly hoping that there'll be a conference at UT at some point so that we can come back and see everyone again.”
The Moncrief Summer Internship Program was founded thanks to the generosity of Mr. W. A. “Tex” Moncrief.
Application criteria for the Summer 2022 Moncrief Internship Program is available at https://www.oden.utexas.edu/academics/undergraduates/moncrief-summer-internship/. The deadline to apply is Feb. 7.
