If they are not out already, pretty soon you will be seeing flyers for BTI around the school and in your science teachers’ rooms. You may just ignore it, but hopefully you’ll ask yourself, “What is BTI? Should I apply?” BTI, or the Boyce Thompson Institute, is a plant research facility founded in 1920 in Yonkers, NY, that moved to Cornell’s campus in the 1970s. It is devoted to using plant science to improve agriculture, human health, and the environment. Every summer, BTI does a summer internship program for high schoolers age 16 or older in the local area and undergraduates from all around the country. Current seniors who did this internship last summer include myself, Lisa Yoo ’17, and Cameron Mitchell ’17.
Interns work in one of two settings: the lab environment and bioinformatics. The lab, as you would expect, involves working hands-on with plants and other lab tools that you might have heard about in your biology courses, such as Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and electrophoresis. My work in the lab was centered around Arabidopsis, which is a small flowering plant that serves as a great model for genetic research due to its large amount of seeds and short life cycle. My mentor and I did a genetic screen for a potential enhancer gene that affects the cell cycle of the plant. That essentially meant that I had to uproot plants that did not show the phenotype, or traits, that I desired—namely, smaller size and earlier flowering—and collect seeds from the plants whose traits did look desirable. The work was repetitive, but with some good music it eventually became a therapeutic process. Of course, the experiments will vary greatly from year to year, and if you apply for a spot in a lab, you could be doing anything from examining leaves under a microscope to going outside to examine corn fields.
Bioinformatics is a new and rapidly growing field of study. It mainly involves the use of computers and the little bit of programming knowledge to extract “big data” from publications all over the world. With the latest technology, we have the ability to publish entire genomes, proteomes, and other “omes” for the rest of the world to see; with a particular set of tech-savviness your lab group can use that information to further the progress of their own studies. Bioinformatics training is much more interdisciplinary than lab work in that the information you will collect is from more than than one experiment in a single field.
The work is actually super fun, and the pay is pretty good too! Now that you’re sold and want nothing more than to do BTI, you have to decide on whether or not you should do it as a high-school student or an undergrad. There are lots of reasons to do either, so my recommendation for you depends on your situation. A high schooler would do it if they are interested in science but do not know what field of study they want to pursue. For instance, I am primarily interested in chemistry, but I decided to do this internship to see what the bio lab experience was like. Now that I know what I like and do not like about biology labs, I feel more comfortable in my decision to pursue chemistry. If you have decided that you want to study plants later on in your career, you may want to consider waiting until college. Furthermore, there are other internship opportunities in college that may catch your eye, so BTI may be worth doing now instead of saving for later. Last but not least, this internship is a pretty heavy hitter on college apps!
That being said, there are reasons to think about doing BTI as an undergrad. For one thing, the experience is way different than being a high schooler. Undergrads live on the Cornell campus and develop a much more intimate connection with each other. They are more involved in BTI-oriented activities on campus, and they spend a lot of time traveling around Ithaca with their new friends. Their work is also more in-depth, since they typically already have a considerable background in biology and plant science. The lab experience that one gets as an undergrad, especially in state-of-the-art facilities like those in BTI and Cornell, is both valuable for their career as a future scientist and as a competitor for graduate school. Although I am certain that you will gain a lot in any case by working at BTI, you should weigh your options carefully.
There are many more details about this internship that I cannot cover in one article! If you have any other questions about the logistics or the experience, visit BTI’s website or feel free to send your questions to my school email, luc.wetherbee@icsd.k12.ny.us.