Vocational Educational Institutions as a Recruitment Tool for PPPL’s High School and Community College Internship Programs

The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, runs yearlong internship programs for high school, community college, and undergraduate students. PPPL’s longitudinal study of our undergraduate interns has found that our pipeline is “sticky” and students that begin their career in the STEM fields tend to stay. With the technical workforce aging and retiring at rate faster than they can be replaced, recruiting from a highly qualified diverse applicant pool is essential. Recently, we began collaborating with vocational high schools in NJ due to a rapid expansion of that population to meet the needs of the state’s manufacturing sector. By recruiting these students into our internship programs, we hope to recreate the “sticky” nature of what we see with undergraduates into our technical workforce. Preliminary results from our recruitment efforts will be presented.