Summertime—typically reserved for travel, spending quality time with friends, and, perhaps, summer reading—is a period of relative tranquility and freedom for students. However, a number of Sixth Formers worked to broaden their academic horizons through scientific internships.
Many students interned in labs at the University of Pennsylvania. For example, Sixth Formers Jack Ford and Joseph Kahana worked in the GRASP lab on a concept known as visual inertial odometry.
“The goal of visual inertial odometry is to figure out where our robot is and how it’s moving throughout a scene,” Ford said. “So if you imagine that you’re controlling something like a robot dog or a drone, you want to be able to figure out where that robot dog or drone is in the world, and when it moves, you want to know how much it’s moved by.”
To do so requires specialized equipment and devices to capture the robot’s surroundings.
“Our method uses something called an event camera,” Ford said. “A special type of camera that [can] record with a very high temporal resolution, which means that it can capture things that happen very quickly, and a high dynamic range, so if there’s a lot of lighting changes, it’s able to capture those as well.”
But figuring out how the robot actually moved from the recorded footage would require an entirely different kind of tool: artificial intelligence.
“We had to do a lot of machine learning. We learned and implemented various algorithms, and waited for weeks as they trained,” Kahana said.
The work with artificial intelligence proved to be extremely successful.
“We were really working at the boundary of knowledge, [as] many of the papers we were reading came out during our internship.”
Joseph Kahana 26
“We were really working at the boundary of knowledge, [as] many of the papers we were reading came out during our internship,” Kahana said. “We developed a new algorithm which performed…better than previous ones.”
Concurrently, Sixth Former Ranvir Gill interned at the University of Pennsylvania’s Madl Biomaterials Laboratory.
“ My work specifically was looking at muscle stem cell migration patterns on different viscoelastic versus elastic substrates,” Gill said. “A lot of the stuff I did, may it be wet lab work or computational work, I ended up learning during my time there.”
Other internships occurred outside of the University of Pennsylvania. At the Pennsylvania Governor School for the Sciences internship at Carnegie Mellon University, Sixth Former Ryan Shams interned for a month.
“My project was studying the effectiveness of sunscreen against UV-induced skin damage…and had about eight members,” Shams said. “There were a total of 70 rising seniors in the program.”
While these internships were all different, all Sixth Formers found the experience rewarding.
“I would say I’ve learned more from this summer internship than maybe I ever have in my entire life,” Ford said. “As a high schooler, I was kind of playing catch-up from the start, but once I figured it out, I now feel like I know these topics in a way that I never would have learned them in a classroom because I got to do it firsthand.”
Similarly, Gill emphasized the value of his internship experience, encouraging others to pursue their own internships.
“ For underclassmen, I’d highly recommend doing a lab going into senior year just because it’s this super-cool experience to get to talk to a lot of people who are really good at their job.”
Nate Gill ’26
“ For underclassmen, I’d highly recommend doing a lab going into senior year just because it’s this super-cool experience to get to talk to a lot of people who are really good at their job,” Gill said.
While these internships have concluded, more work remains. As students in the independent study program led by Ms. Kara Cleffi, these Sixth Formers must create research papers and presentations during the fall, taking with them the knowledge, skills, and relationships created during their internships.
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