By Rob Mitchum // January 25, 2017
The Computation Institute hosts a summer internship program for advanced high school and college students to gain exposure to research. Students are given a chance to participate in various research projects that share a common theme of applying computational and data science techniques to different scientific problems.
Previous projects have focused on areas such as textual analysis of Wikipedia, development of recommendation algorithms for data placement, statistical analysis of hospital data, network analysis of distributed file transfer networks, machine learning to disambiguate authors and classify entities, and development of customized web portals to support domain scientists. These projects span scientific domains including social science, climate and energy policy, computer science, materials science, and biomedical research.
Students pair with CI mentors (researchers and developers) and assigned a project. Projects vary significantly and are suitable for students with varied experience levels and competencies. We accept students with very diverse backgrounds, from schools around the Chicago area (and around the country), and we work with students to assign projects that match their interests and abilities.
The CI summer program lasts between 8-12 weeks with flexible start and end dates dependent on students’ commitments and school terms, and includes a stipend to support students over the summer period.
In addition to actively working with CI mentors and other summer interns, the program hosts weekly meetings for summer students and their mentors. This meeting provides an opportunity to share progress, discuss challenges, and interact with other students and researchers. Each week we will invite faculty, researchers, postdocs, and other students to present their work.
We also host a full day hackathon that exposes students to a variety of different projects. Previous projects have focused on building hardware and software using Arduino and Raspberry Pi, such as the data-visualizing LoopLamp. We will also organize a field trip to visit Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source and Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
2016 student interns tour the Argonne Advanced Photon Source.
Interested students are encouraged to look at the research projects described on the CI blog and explore the many CI centers that participate in the program.
To apply, please complete the application form by March 10. Applicants will be notified of decisions on March 27th. This program runs from June to September.
For further information please contact Kyle Chard (chard@uchicago.edu).