Saudi Summer Internship (SSI) ends on a high note with poster session

By Omar Shamma

Five years ago, the Saudi Summer Internship (SSI) started with only six visiting students. This year, 29 undergraduate students from top universities in Saudi Arabia participated in the 8 to 12 week program. According to the organizers, the program has been steadily growing in quality and number of students since its inception. The program allows interns to participate in graduate level research, as well as develop their English language skills and create effective poster designs to communicate their work.

On August, 6 2018, the visiting students displayed their posters in the Ibn Sina building for their mentoring faculty and the rest of the academic KAUST community. Poster session attendees, which consisted of the students’ mentoring faculty and other community members, walked around the display awarding the students’ posters with four different colored post-it notes, each color corresponding to one of four categories: Understandable; Academically Sound and Intelligent; Engaging and Entertaining and Aesthetically Pleasing.

The poster session helped students summarize what they worked on for the past weeks and gave them a chance to see the outcome of their colleagues’ work.

Abdulmohsen Alsaui, from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), commented, “I am happy that now when I go back to my home university, I can explain to people what I did at KAUST and I can use this poster as a presentation of my work, making it easy to communicate what I did.”

While at KAUST, each of the students were assigned to one of the labs. The SSI posters were branded with the logos of the students’ respective labs. Passing members of the community asked questions about their work and their experience working in the KAUST facilities.

“It was amazing working in the labs. It was so fun. Some obstacles brought me down while working on my project, but the KAUST lab environment helped me overcome them,” said Asmaa Al-Saggaf, undergraduate student at King Abdulaziz University and intern in the Robotics, Intelligent Systems, and Control (RISC)​ lab.

The closing poster session does not signal the end for some SSI projects. Students from local universities are provided with weekly transportation to work on any continuous projects as part of KAUST’s active collaborations with other universities in the kingdom.

Many of the students at the poster session were asked about their time at KAUST by passing faculty. The session gave the mentoring professors a chance to reflect with the students on what they learned while working at KAUST.

“I feel like when I go back to university, I now have more motivation to study. If someone asked me to explain what the best thing I got from coming to KAUST, I would tell them it is that now I have more motivation to study and gain a better understanding of my courses,” said Alsaui.

As the poster session went on, students’ posters filled up with the different colored post-it notes. At the end of the poster session, SSI faculty tallied up the number of notes on each poster and acknowledged the students with highest number in that category.

The students with the most notes in each category were:

• Suhail Aldhurais for most “Understandable” presentation
• Sarah Basyouni’s poster was the most “Academically Sound and Intelligent” and the most “Engaging and Enjoyable”
• Hamad Alsayegh and Ahmed Almehdhar tied with Abdullah Zayat and Safwan for the most “Aesthetically Pleasing” presentation

All photos by Rosemary Mills.