Luke Armbruster's Internship With CALGEM

Introduction

Luke Armbruster is a succeeding Environmental Resource Engineering student at Humboldt State University who has been kind enough to share some information about his experience at an internship with the Department of Energy over two of his summers. The internship is called the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE). He spent 10 weeks of each summer under the instructions of Mark Fischer who is in charge of the California Greenhouse Gas Emissions Measurement project, also known as CALGEM. The CALGEM website can be found here CALGEM or also on the left side bar. While being a part of this project Luke found himself working on a lot of quantifying research on greenhouse gas emissions in California. I was lucky enough to get a chance to interview this brilliant student giving me the opportunity to ask him a couple questions about what an Environmental Resource Engineering student at Humboldt State who is interested in such a program should know about.

How to Join the SURE Program

Luke found out about the SURE program from one of his professors at HSU. After looking around on the internet for a little bit he found the SURE website, which is at SURE (also on the left side bar). To join the program one must have an average GPA of 3.0 or above, have U.S. citizenshipship, complete all of their forms listed on the SURE website, and also send in three letters of recommendations. The qualifications can also be found on the SURE program website. The main acceptances into the program are given to Sophomore and Junior students, but Freshman and Seniors are considered into the program only if they show exceptional skills and qualities. It's a pretty competitive program considering that only 20 new members are admitted every year from across the entire nation, so it is required to have much more than just the minimum qualifications stated above. Some good qualifications to show are leadership skills by being a president or a high leader in a club or having exceptional grades. What made Luke stand out when he was applying for the internship is that he directed a composting program at Humboldt State University for two years before applying for the internship.

CALGEM Research

The Department of Energy releases a certain amount of funding every year to environmental scientists in national labs to do research about climate change and its effects. There are multiple projects than just CALGEM that get funding, but this project is critical in helping out other researchers on greenhouse gas emissions and their effects. Specifically while Luke was working on the project under Mark Fischer CALGEM's main focus was on finding the errors in wind velocity and empirically quantifying the mixing ratios of greenhouse gases. This helps other researchers who are working to find out the effects of greenhouse gases in the environment because the CALGEM project will show these researchers how greenhouse gases spread and mix in the atmosphere. The CALGEM workers have placed multiple types of censors and devices in tall towers between San Francisco and Sacramento to collect data that captures the influences in greenhouse gases of rural and urban land. The data is collected twice a day and analyzed for important greenhouse gases which are CO2 carbon dioxide, CH4 Methane, N2O nitrogen monoxide, SF6 Sulfur hexaflouride, and halo carbons.

[ Figure 1: Sutro tower in San Francisco (left), KCRA Tower, Walnut Grove (right) these are just two of many towers that CALGEM collects their data from.]

The study on greenhouse gasses is becoming more and more important with our growing population. Many scientists blame global warming on greenhouse gases in our atmosphere which reflect sun rays back onto the earth. Whether or not global warming is true greenhouse gases such has carbon dioxide and methane will harm our planet. Negative effects of these gases have already been appearing across the globe. Because of the increase in carbon dioxide emissions that our population has been releasing our oceans have been becoming more and more acidic which will harm many life forms in the ocean. Research done by the CALGEM project is necessary for our society so that other scientists can use precise measurements of greenhouse gasses in their studies to help our environment.



[ Figure 2: This is a carbon tracker from the summer of 2008. It shows CO2 concentrations and how they mix around in the atmosphere. Warm colors show high atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and cool colors show low concentrations. As the summer growing season begins to take hold, photosynthesis by forests and crops draws CO2 and releases oxygen, which opposes the general increase from fossil fuel burning. The resulting high and low CO2 concentrations are then moved around by weather systems to form the patterns shown here.]

Luke's Experience in CALGEM

Luke was overly excited when he found out that he was admitted into the SURE program. Being admitted into such a competitive internship is an amazing accomplishment. The SURE program paid for all his travel expenses, to the orientation in Washington, to his research facility in the Berkeley Lab (which is part of the UC Berkeley campus), and back home once he was complete with the summer internship. The SURE program also paid him a weekly sum of $475, giving Luke a really good salary as an internship employee, some internships don't even pay anything. However, the CALGEM project was far from what he expected an internship like this to be. He had to overcome many challenges during his employment. The hardest challenge to overcome Luke learned was that you have to be able to communicate with some really brilliant people such as his mentor, Mark Fischer, who received his postdoctoral at UC Berkeley in astrophysics. Other challenges are that you have to get used to give constant updates to mentors, understand that your mentor isn't going to have all the answers for you, to gain confidence to do your own work and complete your projects, and also you have to be able to teach yourself. During the internship Luke taught himself Statistical Programming R and many other programs used to quantify data given to him. Luke recommends the classes Computational Methods and ENGR 211 dynamics at Humboldt State if one wants to do an internship like this. They helped him a lot, because he did a lot of work on analyzing graphs and producing graphs with information that was handed to him. Also he used a lot of velocity formulas for winds to figure out at what speeds the gases were moving around and mixing.

A big problem that has been occurring at internship programs is that the interns mostly end up just being coffee slaves for the upper employees and end up not really doing anything important or learn anything new. Luke's internship at CALGEM was far from that. He felt that there was so much opportunity to learn more and felt well challenged by the experience. Because it is a government funded program people are watching you all the time. He said that they watch everything that you do, like how you complete your work to even if you slouch while you work; they want to make sure that you are worth paying for. Luke said that he would never get a job with the government anymore after this program, because he felt like there isn't enough freedom and fun in the workplace. Everyone was completely busy the entire time. He rarely got a chance to communicate with his co-workers during work except to talk about the data they were collecting. Luke made trips into San Francisco almost weekly to keep himself sane during the busy weeks of the internship.

Although Luke found that the internship wasn't the most fun experience in his life, he said he wouldn't trade it for the world. He learned many new skills, such as how to conduct oneself in a career and in a business environment. It helped him become a lot more realistic with the problems going on in the world. So many people dedicate themselves to projects like these and take years to figure our. Luke believes that because of this internship he is much farther ahead than a lot of other engineering students. He now has references to some of the smartest people in the nation. Luke is excited to start his career in environmental engineering and encourages anyone who is interested in this internship into applying.

If you have any more questions feel free to email me at asg53@humboldt.edu