Arushi completed the project this past summer working alongside Dr. Elisa Toloba and Prof. Raja Guhathakurta as part of the Science Internship Program (SIP) at UC Santa Cruz.

Arushi first developed an interest in astronomy in middle school after visiting the Lick Observatory and working on research projects about dark matter, dark energy, and extrasolar planets. The summer after her freshman year at Menlo, with the encouragement of Dr. Arnberg, she applied to the SIP at UC Santa Cruz to conduct real-time astronomy research with university professors and post-docs. The program pairs SIP interns like Arushi with another student and then matches them with a mentor who guides them through the research process.

Arushi has spent many hours looking at planets, galaxies, and nebulae through a telescope, wondering about our place on Earth in an incredibly vast and evolving universe. “Seeing through a telescope is like watching time wind back thousands, or even millions, of years,” she says. Through her research with SIP, she studied the evolution of galaxies over billions of years, and says “it fascinates me that we can trace back time to the very beginnings of our universe to better understand the evolution of our own universe.”

Arushi’s mentors encouraged her to synthesize her research into a technical research paper. To accomplish this formidable task, she spent hundreds of hours writing and researching with the support of her mentors. She says, “as much as I had learned over the summer, my knowledge of the subject deepened and broadened significantly throughout the process of creating the paper.”

Once completed, Arushi submitted the paper to the Siemens Competition, a national science competition for high school students to showcase their scientific research. More than 3,800 students submitted 1,700 projects, and her project was selected as one of 96 regional finalists. For the second round, she presented to and answered questions from 12 judges from Caltech. Following the presentation she says, “in answering the judges’ questions, I realized just how much I had learned in a few short months, but I also recognized the vast amount of knowledge I’ve yet to acquire. I can’t wait to go back to SIP and learn more!”

To learn more about the Science Internship Program (SIP) at UC Santa Cruz, please contact Dr. Arnberg.