When you come to study at UT, you have have
opportunities to do research, here and with
our professors here, or at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory.
The department of energies largest interdisciplinary
science and engineering laboratory.
It's in our backyard.
UT can open these doors for you.
My name is Holly Humphrey, i'm a senior,
and i work in the materials science division
in the carbon fiber and composites labs.
It was all a surprise to me and i was just
super thrilled to be able to come here and
learn anything, but since I've been here,
it's gotten me a lot more excited than I have
ever been about being a chemistry major.
I'm a freshman at UT.
I'm a computer science major and i'm at the
lab to study optimizing the high paramters
of a deep learning network.
It can be used for things like facial recognition
or vocal recognition.
What i'm doing this summer is trying to find
the best way and the best structure for these
deep learning networks.
I am a junior at the University of Tennessee
and my focus of study here is the building
inventory data layer.
I wasn't exactly sure, could I do this
right, will i upset people, and then when
i got here and was like, they were so helpful
and they pretty much taught me everything
i need to know.
Hopefully I get to come back next summer and
continue this research.
My area of research is geographic information
sciences and technology.
I think the biggest thing that's changed for
me since I've been working here is i'd never
used true computer science as a way of learning
geography, so I got to use programs that id
never really worked with before, and it changed
the way that I looked at geography as a discipline.
Research and development is interesting.
It's not analytical chemistry, its not the
same everyday.
There's always something different going on,
there's always something to learn.
What we do here, you can't type into Google
and find an answer to.
We're finding the answers.
I can come to anybody here and they can help
me, and they won't mind to.
Working at ORNL has given me the professional
experience that I need.
Like working in a professional environment
with others, a soft collaboration and everything.
And its given me experience to ask myself,
is this what I want to be doing in the future?
This is a great place to ask questions and
to learn things.
At school you know you get a lab and its like
step by step directions, there's never any
problems, but here you get errors all the
time.
And you have to go back and find them and
correct them.
Id say it's going to help me approach my classes
better, but coming here and finding out I
actually enjoy doing this, I want to work harder and
strive to become better at what I do.
The ability to be this close to a national
lab and have the opportunity to do research
at a national lab, that's unprecedented.
The only thing I can say to future students
is do it, you know, you have to approach someone
and get started as soon as possible.
