Internship at BYU
Just like many former students of the “TUMKolleg”, I took the opportunity to visit an American university with other fellow students for my summer internship.
Brigham Young University (BYU), located in Provo, Utah, is a religious university from the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (a.k.a. Mormons). It is named after the influential church leader and first governor of Utah Brigham Young. BYU is just like any secular American university where students commence their undergraduate studies, though with a few exceptions since it requires very modest behavior, and students must follow a rather conservative dress code.
The university has proven its academic success multiple times by several other nominations and was even ranked the “number one university in the West for student engagement“ by the Wall Street Journal[1]. , BYU offers a broad range of courses to their students, but we only got to see the physics department because Justin Peatross, who organized the whole trip for us, is a physics professor. He is engaged in optics and his specialty lies in high-intensity laser physics.
On our first day at BYU, Professor Peatross had courses to teach that were too advanced for us, so we joined a class for first year college students taught by a senior student. We were doing experiments with magnets and coils, but we had already seen most of the experiments in school before.it was interesting to try everything out by myself nevertheless. After that college class we went to lunch where I was impressed by the number of restaurants in just one cafeteria. Then Professor Peatross took us to a different lab where he gave us two assignments. The first one was to measure the speed of light mechanically without using electronic devices for our measurements. After running some calculations, we were happy to get to the correct speed. In the second experiment we measured the intensity of polarized light that is reflected by glass. The goal was to findBrewster’s angle and make our data match the corresponding Fresnel coefficients. After some time and plotting the data, we saw how our data matched the values predicted by the theory, which was quite satisfying.
Over the next few days at BYU we worked on electronics with Arya, a teaching senior student. She showed us breadboards and an Arduino chip that was programmable which was not new to everybody in our group, but it was for me. After running through some basic tutorials to get to know the board, we started a bigger project. With the breadboard, several capacitors and a car body, we tried to build a car. The challenge, though, was to optimize for energy efficiency and speed at the same time. We built on the car for several hours and in the end, it could drive the test track with a decent evaluation score. I personally learnt the most while working on the car because I had never dealt with electronics before and I found out how difficult but at the same time satisfying it can be.
On our last day at BYU we joined an optics class. After working with lenses and prisms to manipulate light behavior for a bit, we tried to optically measure the distance between the bits on a CD with a laser. We finished our day with a tour through the universe in the university’s planetarium. The show was amazing, and we got to see incredible images of our galaxy, going from our night sky into the depths of other star systems. I am grateful that I could be a guest at BYU and learn so much about electronics and advanced physical topics in in practice which was an unforgettable learning experience.American people & culture
As much as I enjoyed the educational part of our stay, the best part of our internship was getting to know Utah and its people. Thanks to our awesome host families we got to see many parts of Utah. I was astonished to see a very rich and diverse nature. The nature we explored was just incredible. It was fascinating to see the Arches National Park, the long canyons in Zion National Park, the bizarre-looking Goblin Valley and so many other fabulous things that would just take too long to list. All our adventurous hiking tours were filled with fun and joyful moments. Sometimes we found ourselves in remote regions with no soul around apart from us. I enjoyed that experience since it is not easy to find such remote spots with only nature around in Europe.
Aside from nature, we also got to in touch with American culture in all its greatness. Generally, European or German culture is quite similar to the American one, but differences are still visible. When we arrived in Utah, the first thing I noticed was the big size of everything: The size of the roads, cars, buildings and even portion sizes of meals were much bigger than I was used to. I did enjoy the food there, but preferred eating at home with my host family. They were growing their own vegetables in their backyard and even had chickens for eggs. Restaurant meals, in comparison, were often too fat- and sugar-rich for my taste.
I was glad to meet incredibly nice and very open-minded people in Utah. It was good to be surrounded by all these kind people on our activities together. I noticed how open everybody was to strangers. People would just have a little chat with strangers they met on a hike. This would be a rather rare occurence in Germany where people are often more reserved. The best talks, though, were with my host family; we could truly get to know each other and talk about all sorts of topics ranging from the Marvel universe to politics. We talked about our cultural differences a few times and found that the most fundamental parts of our cultures were pretty much the same.
I believe this general openness mentioned earlier is deeply integrated in American culture, but in Utah it also stems from their religion. Most people in Utah are members of the „Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints“ (a.k.a. Mormons). They are Christians and mostly differ from other Christian religions through the “Book of Mormon” which could be considered a “third testament”. We went to church with our host families on every Sunday and I saw that the service was not much different from a Protestant one. However, after church service we had Sunday school where we learnt about the Bible, the Book of Mormon or other elements of their belief. I enjoyed being there because everybody was really welcoming and we could have a good time.
Still, Mormonism is not a faith that is very easy to practice: According to their rules members should pray before eating, have daily scripture time and not consume alcohol or high-caffeine drinks like coffee. It might sound very strict, however, I felt that all their good traits such as openness were affirmed by their belief, and it may even be the reason for their kindness. I will always remember our hosts and everybody there I got to meet as very warm, humble and welcoming people, and I am very thankful that they took us into their houses and made our time in Utah incredibly fulfilling.
Advice for future interns
- You will be traveling with a tourist Visa (ESTA), so don’t mention your internship in the Visa application or when questioned
- Bring a traditional gift from Germany for your host family
- Be prepared that you must stay abstinent from alcohol and should not drink coffee or black tea (Coke is okay, though)
- You will probably go hiking and camping, so bring proper clothes and shoes with a good profile
- Bring modest clothes in accordance with the university’s dress code
- In church, boys should wear a tie and girls may wear a dress
- If you want to use your phone there a lot, you should consider buying a prepaid SIM card in the U.S which is very easy to do.
[1] https://www.byu.edu/academics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_angle (in case you are interested)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations
[4] https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/Introduction
[i] All pictures taken by my travel group or myself