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The Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB) is happy to welcome you for an observation internship.

We do not offer a standard programme for observation internships:

Instead, we work with volunteering scientists and engineers that can free a few hours of their time during the period of your internship to guide you through our institute, to explain you their daily work, to take you in the lab, to answer all of your questions, ... You will get to experience how a job at the institute looks like or how it is exercised.

Most of the time, you won't stay with the same person throughout the entire duration of your internship, but we will propose you an individual programme. This will allow you to get a feeling of the different research and engineering projects performed at BIRA-IASB, going from space physics, through air quality and climate research, the monitoring of the ozone layer, the atmospheres of Mars or Venus, the development of a space mission, the calibration of space instruments in the lab, to operations of scientific experiments onboard the ISS.

Every request is evaluated individually and subject to the following restrictions:

  • We can offer an observation internship for a duration of max. 1 week. Longer periods are only possible if your internship gets accepted by one team, where an individual programme is not needed.
  • You are in the 6th year of secundary school or higher.
  • Your request reaches us at least 2 months in advance.
  • You show a clear motivation for the topics that we are studying at BIRA-IASB.
     

How to apply?

Please send the following to stage-aestage-ae AT aeronomie DOT be :

  • your motivation letter
  • your CV
  • the internship convention

As soon as your request reaches us, we will start our internal search for volunteers, and you should get an answer from us within 2 weeks.
Depending on the availability of the different teams, we will propose you an individual programme as well as a trainee mentor.