Leaders in effective and inclusive STEM: Twenty years of the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators

“How do you imagine people will operate the Deep Space Network in ten years?” After introducing some problems of operating the global collection of space-leaning telecommunications equipment, this prompt was one of the first questions we asked students to set the stage of their 8- or 10-week internships. While inquiry methods are typically applied to classroom learning, we applied similar strategies to designing custom internships that would be meaningful to the student and beneficial to the project, drawing on students’ unique background and experiences. Inquiry methods have the benefits to the student of giving them a scaffolded space to choose an investigation and deliverable which complements their strengths, or one that stretches them to learn new skills. Working backwards from initial project goals, we scoped the initial question-forming phase of inquiry design to those open issues the project needed addressing. The Deep Space Network was undergoing a major transformation in Follow-the-Sun, transitioning to daylight-only operation from 24/7 work. This resulted in many open questions requiring contributions in the fields of user research, design, and software development. We identified other objectives in the areas of leadership; teamwork; disability, equity, inclusion; and validation and iteration. This chapter describes the methods we used to design the internship project, how we facilitated it, prepared for each intern’s arrival, and measured progress in the students’ 8- to 10-week internships. This method has been used for all 18 interns over seven years to positive outcomes, resulting in four internal hires.