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Freshman Dina Abdel-Fattah’s first project at the Applied Research Center (ARC) in Newport News, Va., involved the mystery of some scratched laser lenses. A recent batch of the special polishing papers had left some nasty marks on some very expensive lenses and Abdel-Fattah joined a team in the surface-characterization lab assigned to find out why.

“There were some specks present on the paper when they bought it,” Abdel-Fattah said. “And we wanted to find out what these specks were, so we used microscopy and stuff to see what elements the specks are made of. Then we tried to find out what kind of compound contained those elements.”

During the investigation into the damaged lenses, Abdel-Fattah was introduced to techniques and instruments such as the HIROX microscope, scanning electron microscope and time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry. Such a beginning would have been perfectly reasonable for a first-year graduate student, but she had just completed her junior year at Tabb High School when she began work at the ARC under the mentorship of Amy Wilkerson, the laboratory and research manager.

The ARC is a nationally recognized research facility operated by a consortium of four Virginia universities, including William and Mary, and the Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory. For several years, Wilkerson has been accepting a number of undergraduates and even some high-school students such as Abdel-Fattah into paid internships in the surface-characterization lab.

“It’s not really a program,” Wilkerson said. “It just sort of evolved. I think it started with physics students wanting to use our equipment for doing their student theses.” She has had as many as seven students at a time serving internships of 10 to 20 hours per week.

It turned out that the culprits in the mystery of the scratched lenses were tiny chunks of ink. Like sandpaper, the lens-cleaning medium is one-sided, with printing on the back. Ink particles from the printing on the back side, abrasive enough to scratch the delicate lenses, somehow had gotten loose and became embedded on the front of the pieces stacked underneath.

Abdel-Fattah went on to participate in the lab’s metallurgical examination of bloomery iron made by blacksmiths at Colonial Williamsburg. She will continue to work at the ARC after classes start. Her next project will be making tips for a scanning tunneling microscope. She will use a chemical etching process to make the tips, which narrow down to the thickness of a single atom.

Her internship at the ARC will let her begin her college career at William and Mary with substantial practical lab experience, and she is not even sure whether she wants to major in science.

“I plan to do something with science eventually, whether it’s a major or a minor, but I do plan to have science in my career somehow,” she said. “The work here made me more open to science. Even though I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do, it at least gave me the option of what I could go after graduating—what kind of job market there is out there and what you can do with a science major.”

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