Concluding DataWhys Summer Internship Program 2025

07 Jul 2025 . Category . Comments #research #education-research #datawhys #data-science #machine-learning #programming #statistics #service #outreach

Today we concluded our sixth year of a summer internship program in data science - our second year in person!

We switched to a hybrid in-person format in 2024 after being entirely virtual 2020-2023 for COVID. In 2024 we also:

• Made the internship basically full-time
• Offered housing support
• Offered free lunch

which we kept in 2025, and we also added travel support. Travel and housing support might have been the winning combination for 2025, as we had 19 interns, our largest group ever. This is almost 50% more interns than 2024, and 2024 was our largest group previously.

This year we also seemed to have the strongest interns in terms of preparation, and based on the final project presentations, the best outcomes in terms of group-wide learning.

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. As last year, 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 Teams 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 focused on environmental education, a local nonprofit involved in attracting and retaining talent in Memphis, and a nonprofit concerned with criminal justice reform. All the projects were very successful, and it was a delight to see what the interns accomplished.

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