Career opportunities abound for TARGET students

Students in the TARGET summer program proudly wear medals they earned by completing a career workshop by the consulting firm Educational GameWorks.

It's the oft-repeated question asked of so many high school students: "What do you want to study in college?"

The 13 students in Fermilab's TARGET program always have their well-rehearsed responses ready, but now that they've been listening to Fermilab scientists and industry professionals talk about their own careers, they're also keeping their options open.

"A couple of scientists have talked about how they thought they knew what they wanted to do, and having a life experience that completely changed their paths," said Karen Lipa, a junior at Glenbard South High School in Glen Ellyn. "It makes you think, 'Wow, that could be something I'm interested in too.'"

TARGET is a highly selective internship for high school students from demographic groups underrepresented in the sciences. The students, all armed with strong math and science backgrounds, work on projects at Fermilab while they learn about electronic circuitry or alternative energy sources.

During the six weeks they're here, TARGET students hear physicists talk about their projects and computer scientists discuss how they came to work at a high-energy physics laboratory. Earlier this month students also got some practical advice about taking advantage of educational opportunities in college from two directors of the multicultural student center at University of Notre Dame.

The message from the pros is clear: whether you're studying trigonometry or trileptons, you can use the experience you gain in almost any scientific career.

"Sometimes first-generation college students don't know what disciplines they can use their skills in because there hasn't been an engineer or a computer professional in their families," said Dianne Engram, equal opportunity and diversity manager.

The TARGET career effort aims to change that.

"Hearing people communicate those stories with us is useful because we hear the experiences they had and see where our paths fit into that," said Dominic Gattone, who attends Marist High School in Chicago.

"Their opportunities are limitless," said Sandra Charles, administrator of TARGET. "All it takes is some confidence and a little bit of curiosity."

-- Leah Hesla

No sighting of Higgs, but Fermilab physicists say they may be close

from ScienceNOW, July 26, 2010

A week ago, a rumor sped across the Internet that physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, had discovered a particle called the Higgs boson, the most-coveted prize in high-energy physics and the fundamental particle thought to give all others their mass. In fact, researchers working with Fermilab's aging atom smasher, the Tevatron, have not spotted the Higgs. But they have narrowed the range of masses in which the particle most likely exists, they reported here today at the International Conference on High Energy Physics.

That improved nonobservation has Fermilab physicists convinced that they have a real shot at seeing the Higgs before it's bagged by a more-powerful atom smasher, Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). So they're pushing to run the Tevatron for three extra years, through 2014. "There's definitely a window of opportunity here," says Dmitri Denisov, a physicist at Fermilab and co-spokesperson for the 500-member team working with the massive D0 particle detector, part of the lab's Higgs-hunting effort.

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