IRIS hosts a Young Scholar Program student for the summer


Meet one of our summer interns, Miller Cooper!

Cooper, a rising junior at Athens Academy, joined Dr. Felix Santiago-Collazo’s Compound Inundation Team for Resilient Applications (CITRA) Lab this summer for the Young Scholars Program (YSP) at UGA. Cooper has always enjoyed learning about STEM in school, and applied for the internship as a productive way to explore those interests over the summer. He spent six weeks of his summer working with Dr. Santiago and graduate student Orlando Viloria-Marimón.

What were you working on this summer? 

I’m working on modeling watersheds in Puerto Rico. So basically for the format of this model, called SWMM, Stormwater Management Model. We can run simulations based on rainfall and calculate the amount of water that’s moving to the outlet of this watershed. So my job was basically to make that streamlined, make it easier, instead of hand modeling it for like six hours, right? It’s a lot of sitting down at the desk and just grinding it out, basically. Opening the files and then writing them to another different file, there’s a lot of that, and there’s a lot of programming. 

Did you take anything from this experience that you think helped prepare you for the future, and what were you hoping to take away from it?

Definitely, I think it taught me how to work hard, and I learned a lot of new things. I didn’t know any of the programming language, Python, which I had to learn for this. And something else I had to learn for this– I didn’t really know much about hydrological modeling. I had to learn all this stuff. And my mentor, Orlando– I mean, I don’t think I would have been able to do anything without him. He helped me with everything. I remember the first day when I was struggling to just like, open the shapefiles and read them, and he just comes over and in two seconds, he’s like, yeah, you just need to do this… and it works perfectly fine. 

Cooper presented a poster titled Simplifying Hydrologic and Hydraulic Modeling for Puerto Rico in a poster session for the end of the Young Scholars Program. Left to right: Orlando Viloria-Marimón, Miller Cooper, Dr. Félix Santiago-Collazo.

Was there anyone who made an especially big impact on you this summer? 

Yeah, Orlando, for sure. Dr. Santiago also definitely helped me with my poster; we had a poster presentation last week with the introduction to the project and all the results. And all the other YSP interns were amazing.

What was the biggest challenge for you? 

The biggest challenge, I would say, is reaching the end goal. So this is a pretty big project, and trying to get through the entire project was a big task.

Was there anything else you really enjoyed about being here this summer?

I really liked the people that I got to work with. Everyone under Dr. Santiago was nice, and again, coding is one of my interests. Every day I got to learn about and do something I really like and enjoy.
The Young Scholars Program (YSP) is a paid five-week summer internship for high school students interested in environmental science. Students work 30 hours per week to actively engage with research under the guidance of a faculty mentor and present their research at the Young Scholars Pre-Collegiate Research Conference held in the final three days of the program.