After the four weeks of French language courses, each student is assigned an advisor at one of INPL's laboratories in the Nancy area.  The coordinator of the program in France tries to match up each student with a position that is closely related to their major or the subjects they selected on the application; however, an exact match rarely happens.  I lucked out in shadowing a researcher studying fluorescence which was rather closely related to my  engineering physics major.  Some other students, however, were not as well matched.  The following are some of the examples of the student/internship matches made for the program:

• Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering - Mixed / tested chemicals in a laboratory
• Aerospace Engineering - Wrote a computer program to model proteins
• Materials Science and Engineering - Ground up plant roots for testing
• Mechanical Engineering - Designed a vehicle transmission

Although many students agreed that the internships were not as independent and as useful as a summer research position might be, most of us agreed that we gained more from meeting new people and discussing science and engineering in a different language.
 

Laboratory Setup An example of a laboratory experiment setup	More Technology Using spectrometers to measure absorption spectrums of compounds	My Internship from the left: M. Francis Baros (my advisor), me, and Fanny (a PhD student)