RSE Intern Case Studies

[Robadob]

The goal of this scheme, is to create a collection of case-studies, regarding work-experience schemes alongside RSEs (and more broadly dRTPS). These would hopefully encourage and support other teams to create similar opportunities, whilst also acting as a reference for what opportunities exist.

There is particular concern around how many of these opportunities are open to people from outside a Computer Science background.

Any scheme where a non dRTP temporarily works alongside dRTPs is within scope for a case study. Including, but not limited to; school work experience, apprenticeships, year in industry studentships & PhD student secondments.

Draft Questions (Awaiting feedback/approval from Trustees)

• Duration of placement
• Intern’s education stage or highest level of education
• Background of intern (e.g. undergraduate course topic or employment background)
• Supervisor’s career stage or job title
• Funding model
  • Was it paid?
  • If so, who funded this/how?
• How was the intern recruited?
• What project/s did they work on, or what kind of tasks did you work on?
• Were there any outputs from their time as an intern? (e.g. publications/talks/open source software)
• What were the direct outcomes from running this internship? (e.g. employment, training, running the internship scheme again etc.)
• Lessons learned from host institution
  • What worked well/would you recommend?
  • What was a challenge/should be done differently?
• Optionally: Statement from intern (that we can tag on later if needed)
  • What worked well/would you recommend?
  • What was a challenge/should be done differently?
• Anything else you would like to share/that we’ve missed?

Actions remaining

• Finalise questions (inside EDIA WG) 2025-11-10
• Finalise questions (trustee approval) 2025-12-08
• Agree method of distribution 2025-11-10 (form and word doc options available)
• Distribute directly to known cases
• Review, Edit, Publish responses.
• Advertise more widely

Known cases to capture (Syndicated from 2025-09-2022 minutes)

• Birmingham BEAR challenge (via Louise Brown)
  • 1 week undergraduate interns
• York year in Industry (via Robert Chisholm)
  • Contact Phil Harrison from York RSE and Maciez Zaweracz
  • Year long undergraduate placement (2nd year compsci?)
• Sheffield, 1 day work experience (via Robert Chisholm)
  • Contact Romain Thomas from Sheffield RSE
  • School of computer science has several work experience students for a week, they rotate through teams.
• N8 Interns, short summer internships for undergraduates (via Robert Chisholm)
  • Scheme is currently managed by Sam Bland (York, N8 RSE Theme Lead?)
  • Each N8 university has had several interns over past few years, not all specific to RSE
• Durham ARC T-level (college) placements (via Samantha Finnigan)
• Manchester RSE year in industry (via Oscar Seip, probably Gillian's team?)
• Turing Interns
• UCL ARC Intern via goverment schema (via Stef Piatek)
  • Shiying Wei
• ICR Scientific computing apprentices via Rachel Alcraft
• RFI Mark Basham
  • HDR UK Internship
• Could we stretch the umbrella to student cluster competition teams?
• HDR UK Black internship programme
  • https://www.hdruk.ac.uk/study-and-train/train/health-data-science-black-internship-programme/

RSEleaders collection of outreach and work experience

[Robadob]

I've updated the OP with notes from today's meeting re: goal etc, hopefully in a position for you to share with trustees @stefpiatek

[l-ballantyne]

Perhaps add a question to both the intern/institute about whether the internship lead to anything else. Training, jobs, institution running the prog again or developing further opportunities. Basically.. any outcome that resulted from the internship

[iainbarrass]

Re: question about intern's subject area. Can we also capture the background of the intern, whether STEM, DH, etc.? Possibly also supervisor's.

[Robadob]

Can we also capture the background of the intern, whether STEM, DH, etc.?

How do you anticipate this differing from "Intern’s subject area (e.g. undergraduate course topic)", mature students/interns?

[iainbarrass]

Yes, for most (young) undergraduates background can be reasonably taken from the subject. For mature students or post-graduate degrees (20 years as an archaeologist -> software engineering MSc) the subject is less informative.

[stefpiatek]

Updated the questions to reflect the feedback. Oscar will ask around for some feedback on the questions. In the new year we'll send out to cases that we know of.

[Robadob]

Building materials in this google drive folder (setup by Mark Basham in SocietyRSE drive)

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1MsmOeZtnyFOy9LJCPCaMZ0GJH5SRuYt3

I've now setup the google form version, I'll try to get the MSWord doc version sorted early next week.

[Robadob]

The word document version is now also setup, I did it with proper controls and edit restriction (although I haven't bothered encrypting/passwording).

Noticed two challenges:

• Not 100% sure how to style the text fields so they're not minimum size (I have configured them to allow/deny multi-line subject to short/long text answer on the google form).
• Making the .docx available via Google Drive opens it within google docs, which completely breaks the form. May want to host it via socrse website to avoid this.
  • It's currently linked from the google form's header, this will need changing.

Otherwise I think its largely ready.

[stefpiatek]

Sorry I left you hanging here @Robadob. I think we're good to go, are you happy with the form as-is?

Not 100% sure how to style the text fields so they're not minimum size (I have configured them to allow/deny multi-line subject to short/long text answer on the google form).

I'm not sure you can. We could have (please write a long response) for them to make it clear?

Making the .docx available via Google Drive opens it within google docs, which completely breaks the form. May want to host it via socrse website to avoid this.

* It's currently linked from the google form's header, this will need changing.

Had a toy around and I think we can give a direct download link/ I've updated the link on the form.

[Robadob]

Thanks Stef, I couldn't solve that direct download link!

I guess we're ready to distribute now then. Worth launching in the next SocRSE newsletter and sending out direct invites soon-after?

[stefpiatek]

Belated (again) but yep ready to submit to the newsletter and then reach out people directly. @stefpiatek will do newsletter submission