LLRISE is a two-week residential program for rising high school seniors.
There's an application process for the students and we accept
students from across the nation. MIT Lincoln Laboratory is a
federally funded research and development center and we here at
Lincoln Laboratory believe that community outreach is very important.
That's why LLRISE was developed. We wanted to give students
an opportunity to work with staff members at Lincoln and we also
wanted to get students excited about science and engineering and
work at a state-of-the-art lab.
A typical day for an LLRISE student is in the morning they have
lectures given by staff members from Lincoln Laboratory.
Then in the afternoon they get to do a hands on project.
So for this year as part of the LLRISE program the students are
making a miniature radar and that radar is capable of doing ranging
which is being able to determine how far targets are and they are
also capable of doing Doppler which is them being able to determine
the speed of targets and they can also do SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar)
which is imaging objects or targets that are are a certain distance away.
And they are actually doing everything from scratch: 3D printing the
layout, soldering of the board, the layout their RF components,
assembling everything together and testing it.
At the end of the day the greatest joy is seeing the expression on
their faces, it's just priceless. You look at it and its just a feeling of,
"Wow. I built this, and its working, and its giving me good data."
As an instructor you're just standing there and you're just filled with pride.
I believe that they learn a lot when they're building hands-on because
they actually can see the components and they can ask specifically,
"What does this do?" and we can explain to them how the system works.
I've always enjoyed teaching what I know because I appreciate
when other people teach me and being able to provide this type
of an environment to students is something that I really enjoy.
Seeing the passion that they have is reminiscent of when I was a
student engineer and it reminds me of why I got started doing the
things that I'm doing today; and the passion that we had for physics
and math and engineering.
Beyond them working on some of the technical components we also
are teaching them a little bit on how to develop some of their soft
skills. By soft skills I mean being able to interact with people, being
able to converse with others and also being able to put together
presentations; putting together power-point presentations and being
able to stand in front of a crowded audience and present the work
that they've done.
At the end of the day I think that they learn how to interact with
like-minded people but also with a diversity of experiences.
And being part of MIT Lincoln Laboratory and being part of a program
such as this is something that you can't really find anywhere else
and that is somewhat what makes the experience at the lab very,
very unique. I mean it's MIT so, this is just the perfect place to be.