The program will target 4 areas of professional development for students:

1. Research skills. We will focus on developing the students’ ability to apply the scientific method in their research and development activities.
2. Completing short-duration projects. In industry and in academia, we are often confronted with compressed schedules, such as this 9-week research experience. We will work with IRES students on learning to carefully plan their activities in order to maximize the likelihood of success under such time constraints.
3. Collaboration. IRES students will collaborate with a number of people, from their mentors Schmidt and Boll, to other students from their cohort, to researchers at their host institutions, as well as Kun and Shaer. We will emphasize the importance of collaboration and how it relates to setting attainable goals (what can the team accomplish under time and resource constraints?).
4. The human experience. As Steve Jobs remarked in a 1996 interview with Wired Magazine, “A lot of people … haven’t had very diverse experiences. … The broader one’s understanding of the human experience [emphasis added], the better design we will have.” In their 9 week program IRES students will have this “human experience” living and working in a foreign country. We will emphasize the importance of experiencing and appreciating the differences in culture between Germany and the US.