summer internships at Warwick

internships for midnight sun [2016]

[Aki Vehtari asked me to post this announcement for internships next summer at Aalto Science Institute, Otaniemi, Finland. Otaniemi is around 10 km from Helsinki.]

The Aalto Science Institute internships program offers undergraduate students(at BSc level) the opportunity to participate first-hand in topical research,to interact with the premier research groups at Aalto University, and to network in an international environment. Positions are available in several fields of study ranging from nanotechnology and semiconductors to machine learning, data communications and human-computer interaction. AScI interns are usually hired for three months, and the typical training period is from 01 June until 31 August. The interns are employed by the departments of the School of Science and the School of Electrical Engineering, and the exact timing of the internship may be agreed with the hosting department. The incoming students are mentored throughout the stay by one of the professors affiliated with AScI. The priority for incoming AScI-internship positions is given to students who have not yet been studying or working at Aalto. AScI internship students will receive a salary which is sufficient to cover living costs such as accommodation. The salary is determined based on experience and qualifications according to the salary system of Aalto University for student interns. Minimum internship salary is 1450 €/ month.

Deadline for applications is 18 February 2016.

new kids on the block

This summer, for the first time, I took three Dauphine undergraduate students into research projects thinking they had had enough R training (with me!) and several stats classes to undertake such projects. In all cases, the concept was pre-defined and “all they had to do” was running a massive flow of simulations in R (or whatever language suited them best!) to check whether or not the idea was sound. Unfortunately, for two projects, by the end of the summer, we had not made any progress in any of the directions I wanted to explore… Despite a fairly regular round of meetings and emails with those students. In one case the student had not even managed to reproduce the (fairly innocuous) method I wanted to improve upon. In the other case, despite programming inputs from me, the outcome was impossible to trust.  A mostly failed experiment which makes me wonder why it went that way. Granted that those students had no earlier training in research, either in exploiting the literature or in pushing experiments towards logical extensions. But I gave them entries, discussed with them those possible new pathways, and kept updating schedules and work-charts. And the students were volunteers with no other incentive than discovering research (I even had two more candidates in the queue).  So it may be (based on this sample of 3!) that our local training system is missing in this respect. Somewhat failing to promote critical thinking and innovation by imposing too long presence hours and by evaluating the students only through standard formalised tests. I do wonder, as I regularly see [abroad] undergraduate internships and seminars advertised in the stats journals. Or even conferences.