Sandia National Labs offering internship program

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – Sandia National Labs offers a number of outreach programs designed to cultivate the next generation of scientists and engineers. Kylie Grenier is a third-year undergraduate at the University of Texas in Austin studying Geophysics.

“I’ve always really liked physics and I’ve always like no, I didn’t want to do just physics, but something kind of adjacent to it,” says Grenier. While attending a job fair, she heard about an internship program at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque.

The successful application brought the budding physicist to the high deserts of Albuquerque as part of Sandia’s FORCEE program. FORCEE stands for “Future of Research for Climate, Earth, and Energy – an internship program co-developed by Kyle Jones, manager of the geophysics department at Sandia.

“I was hoping to inspire them to want to be a part of Sandia and do the research that they do for a longer period of time,” says Jones.

According to Sandia, the program hosts around 75 in-person interns, and 75 remote participants in a comprehensive and immersive dive into the work happening at Sandia, an opportunity most folks don’t have topics related to earth science, climate change, and other topics related to the field.

Some students participate during the summer. “Some of those are year-round students that work with us all the time, but half are brand new first-year summer interns,” says Jones.

As a national lab, Sandia is interested in bringing students from all across the country, and all walks of life, to the table. According to Jones this summer, saw nearly 50 students from UNM, six from New Mexico Tech, six from NMSU, with the remaining 80-plus interns from across the country and Puerto Rico.

“I’ve got to see a lot of things that I’ve never seen before, and I’ve gotten to meet a lot of new people that do a lot of different things that I do, to learn about all different kinds of research,” says Grenier.

FORCEE’s goal, according to Jones, is to reach students like Kylie before they make decisions about their path after graduation. The hope is that their talents and passion for their work will find a home at Sandia.

“I think more importantly than anything else, our students are the most important part of the future of this institution, [the] future of the research for this country. And the earlier that we get them started and hooked on the work that we do here, I believe the longer they’re going to wind up staying,” Jones says.

Jones will soon be departing the program for a new leadership role but FORCEE will continue with a trio of new managers and mentors for the 2025 cohort.

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