Internships for Female Pupils

In various media, scientists’ jobs are often depicted in an excessively comical or unrealistic way. In many cases, female scientists are shown as socially weird or not existent at all. These images lead to false or biased conceptions of life as a scientist, in particular in the minds of pupils. Although there are plenty of programs that give people a glimpse into the real world of a scientist, such as Girls’Day, Forscherinnen-Tag, or Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften, they last for approximately half a day and only scratch the surface of the life and struggles of a scientist.

The CRC 951 aims to give pupils an authentic inside view of working as a physicist or chemist. To this end, the CRC 951 in collaboration with Club Lise Mentoring offers pupils the opportunity for internships in various scientific projects covering material science, device development, computational simulations and characterisation techniques. The pupils (the mentees) gain insight into the day-to-day business of a researcher (the mentor), participate in group meetings, and become involved in their own research project related to hybrid inorganic/organic systems for opto-electronics. A past mentee won the first prize at the regional level of ‘Jugend forscht’ for her work on dendrimer OLEDs during her internship with the CRC 951 project B14 (List-Kratochvil) (more information here). Although the internships are open to all genders, our focus is clearly to spark the interest of female pupils in science. To date, 15 of 18 interns were female pupils and we look forward to sponsor more in the future.

You can find out more about internships in the CRC 951 here.