Perspectives: Seeing from Within and Without.
By: Cheryl Leutjen
Tags: Integrity, Scientists, Environmentalism, Sexism

I’d been selected for an internship at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Labs in Oakridge, Tennessee. Yes, “Site X” of the Manhattan Project. Where plutonium-239 was first produced in the world’s first continuously operating nuclear reactor. I wasn’t going to work in nuclear physics, but the momentous history still impressed-and also unnerved-me. A devout pacifist, would my participation in this internship count as condoning the industrial-military complex? I recoiled in pacifist horror at the thought. But my lust for resume fodder outweighed my ethical dilemma.

The internship offer arrived as a shock, an honor that I didn’t dream I’d receive. I was a budding geology student at a small liberal arts college not known for its science program. Surely the likes of ORNL, as Oak Ridge became known to me later, would only accept students from the most esteemed universities. Most likely covered in ivy. And those students surely had completed more than my few, measly hours of science classes. When the offer letter arrived, I had to read it twice, to be sure I understood its intent. Then I cried. They wanted ME.

My parents were both proud and appalled when I announced I’d won this internship. I hadn’t prepped them, given the low odds of acceptance. It seemed like saying, hey mom and dad, I applied for sainthood or something. Why trigger that parental alarm? No self-respecting 19-year old would.

The appalling part, for my parents, aside from my absence all summer, was my request for financial help. The internship included free housing and a modest stipend, which was nice, but I wasn’t sure it would feed me. My folks were already strapped and felt they’d done all they could to support my college education. But how often does a girl from Gladstone, Missouri earn an internship at such a prestigious institution as ORNL? They conceded. And then drove me to the airport. White knuckled, mom was, because of her violent fear of flying.

I got along well with my two female roommates, I was relieved to find. Our apartment was a welcome port in a sea of testosterone; the vast majority of interns in that cockroach-infested dorm were male. Many of them were so steeped in physics and chemistry that ordinary conversation failed them. I felt like an imposter, like I’d snuck in the backstage door, waving a phony pass. Any minute, I could be ushered to the door.

But I took considerable pride in earning the lowest-level security clearance and badge to enter that venerable research facility. I wasn’t even old enough to buy a cocktail yet, but I was soon breezing into ORNL like a veteran. So very far away from my hot pink-and-lime-green bedroom, snuggling my giant fuzzy foot rug.

Not that I revealed an ounce of the excitement, fear and anxiety I felt to be catapulted from suburbia to intelligentsia. I was a “can’t-faze-me” teenager, after all. I never displayed the awe I felt to be accepted by every scientist there as if I were the next Madame Curie. Or the insecurity I felt to be working with so many interns from hallowed universities. But work alongside them I did, and my self-esteem plumped up like a bun in the oven. The yeasty kind.

One day, several of us interns and our supervisors were invited to tour a coal processing plant. Despite my abhorrence of coal, I was thrilled to be sprung for the day, like a kindergartner going to the zoo. The daily work of the internship involved a lot of dull, tedious review of data. Which did dampen my enthusiasm for a career in science, I have to say.