Concluding DataWhys Summer Internship Program 2024

03 Jul 2024 . Category . Comments #research #education-research #datawhys #data-science #machine-learning #programming #statistics #service #outreach

Today we concluded our fourth year of a summer internship program in data science - the first year we held it in person!

Because of COVID, we moved the internship online in 2020, and we kept it virtual through 2023 because we felt that it increased access. However we were concerned with motivation with the online format. Some interns seemed to chronically have connectivity problems beyond what might be expected several years into the pandemic.

So for 2024 we decided to make the internship basically full-time and to offer housing support and lunches for free to remove obstacles to participation. In order to make the internship full time, we compressed an 8 week part time internship (21 hours/week) to 5 weeks (32.5 hours/week). We decided to keep the first three weeks in-person but let the last 2 weeks, the project phase, be virtual. We must have done something right, because we had our largest cohort ever, 13 interns. Of these, 11 requested and received internship housing.

I think we had our best outcomes ever in terms of group-wide learning. In other words, while the virtual format worked well for high-ability motivated interns, I think the in-person component worked for everyone.

The internship structure was a 1 week programming bootcamp, followed by 2 weeks of data science (using a selection of our free/open training materials), followed by 2 weeks of community-sourced projects. We had to cut a few topics to shrink everything down to five weeks, but nothing crucial. During the remote project phase, almost all communication was through Discord except for Zoom meetings for faculty lunches/invited presentations. We used JupyterHub to create a consistent environment for the interns with all the software libraries they need preinstalled.

Our projects this year involved program evaluation for a local nonprofit that helps refugees, split across three teems. Interns on all teams were really motivated, and I was very proud of what they accomplished!

The DataWhys Project and internship are supported by the National Science Foundation through Grant 1918751 for to the University of Memphis.