Davis High students intern at UC Davis

PHOTO: Junior Jared Umphress pose with fellow students while interning at UC Davis.

By Leyla Bolkan,

BlueDevilHUB.com Staff–

Davis High students have the opportunity to intern with various departments and professors at UC Davis, as the university campus is so close to DHS. 

Many DHS science classes, such as environmental science and the biotechnology internship class, work with UCD professors and programs that accept high school student volunteers as part of their research.

Environmental science teacher Eric Bastin works with UCD professor Jennifer Funk in the plant science department. She directs high school students to help with the research of her graduate students.

Funk sponsored similar internship experiences when she was a professor in Southern California and she sought to replicate the experience at UCD. Currently, 10 of Bastin’s students work with Funk’s graduate students.

“It’s an opportunity that students aren’t usually going to get in high school,” Bastin said.

Junior Jared Umphress volunteered to intern as he is interested in environmental science and wanted to know if he would like the research aspect of it.

Right now he is studying how climate change affects native plants as opposed to non-native plants.

He gathers data, such as plant height; processes data, such as leaf samples; or enters data on spreadsheets.

So far, Uphress has learned how research is conducted, how researchers come up with questions  and new topics on environmental science 

“It benefits my understanding of environmental science because it applies knowledge I have gained from the class that I can understand further by doing research that applies those principles,” Umphress said.

However, Umphress has some struggles with doing the internship. He has had to alter his tennis schedule to one day less a week, which hinders his abilities on the DHS men’s tennis team.

But Umphress says that it is worth it for the field experience, which not many students get to have, as well as being able to figure out if he likes the research aspect of environmental science.

“These are things a lot of times undergraduates at universities don’t even get to do and here are a couple of high school students interning,” Bastin said.