Cooperative Education (Co-op) Program

This program provides opportunities for undergraduate students in engineering, applied physics, or computer science to enrich their classroom learning experience by working closely with NRAO technical staff on projects at the technological forefront in radio astronomy instrumentation. The program offers participants a way to help finance their college education while accumulating career-related work experience and skills, and making valuable professional contacts.

Students in this program will work under the supervision of an NRAO staff advisor in one or more areas of:

• radio-astronomical research,
• instrument design, development, fabrication and testing; or
• scientific programming, digital instrumentation and/or analysis.

There are cooperative education opportunities available at all three of the NRAO's main sites:

GBT	Green Bank, West Virginia which operates the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the world's largest fully steerable single-antenna radio telescope, a 100-meter class unblocked aperture for centimeter and long millimeter wavelengths,
EVLA	Socorro, New Mexico which operates the Expanded VLA (EVLA), a real-time 27-antenna aperture synthesis instrument for centimeter-wavelength imaging, polarimetry and spectrometry over baselines of tens of kilometers, and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), an asynchronous aperture synthesis instrument that extends these techniques to baselines of thousands of kilometers,
ALMA	Charlottesville, Virginia which hosts the North American ALMA Science Center, supporting science use of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) by North American astronomers, and the NRAO Technology Center, an engineering laboratory for the design and development of advanced instrumentation for centimeter and millimeter wavelengths - including antenna elements, low-noise detectors, mixers, amplifiers, integrated receiver packages and advanced digital processors for ALMA, for the EVLA, the VLBA, the GBT, and other instruments at the forefront of radio astronomy.

Full-time students who have registered in the Cooperative Education Program at a participating university can be funded to work at the NRAO for two or three semesters after completing at least 30 semester hours of college credit. Participants must maintain full-time status in a major that permits a cooperative work program, must have earned at least a 2.8 grade point average, and must be U.S. citizens or have authorization to work in the U.S.

For more details on eligibility, salary and benefits in this NRAO program, please see NRAO Co-op Opportunities (PDF file)

Examples of opportunities for cooperative education at the observatory in 2008/2009:

• to work in the Electronics Division in Socorro
  Application information for position starting January 2010 (PDF)
   
  
• to work in the NRAO Technology Center in Charlottesville .
   
  
• to work in the Electronics or Software Development Divisions in Green Bank

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The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.