New Perspectives in Science Education

Since 1984 the Italian groups of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) collaborating with at the national DOE laboratory of Fermilab (USA) have been running a two-month summer training program for Italian university students. In the first year the program involved only a few Pisa physics students. The program was later extended to engineering students. Since 2004 the program is supported in part by DOE in the frame of an exchange agreement with INFN. An additional agreement for sharing support for engineers of the Scuola Superiore di S.Anna (SSSA) of Pisa was established in 2007 between SSSA and Fermilab, according to which about four students are supported each year. Over the 30 years of its history, the program has involved several hundreds of Italian students. In the eight years 2010 - 2017 Fermilab hosted 250 students in physics and engineering from more than a dozen of Italian universities. With ISSNAF support, NASA and other US space science Research Institutes, hosted 25 additional students. The training programs spanned from physics and astrophysics data analysis to construction of neutrino detectors and accelerator components to R/D on superconductive elements to theory of accelerators. In 2015 the University of Pisa created an ad-hoc Summer School and all the Fermilab interns are temporarily enrolled at the University of Pisa for the duration of the internship. Upon successful completion of the program, and positive evaluation of a University of Pisa committee, students are acknowledged 6 ECTS credits for the Master Degree. At the end of the stages the students are required to write summary reports on their achievements, which are saved in the Fermilab and ISSNAF web pages as elements of the students curricula, for consultation and any possible future use.The program is now also part of the Outreach activities of the European Projects Muse (H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 GA 690835) and News (H2020-MSCA-RISE-2016 GA 734303). The program is expected to grow in the near future under the management of CAIF, the Cultural Association of Italians at Fermilab. Information on student recruiting methods, on detailed training programs of recent years and on final student`s evaluation will be given in the presentation. 

Keywords: Internship, USA Laboratories, Physics, Engineering;

References

[1] Donati, S., et al., “The Italian Summer Students Program at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory”, European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics, Venice, Italy, 5-12 July 2017, 3 pages.