PEW Research Center Internship Opportunity: Paid

PLEASE NOTE: This opportunity is listed for reference only. The deadline to apply has passed.

This is a paid employment opportunity from outside the Rockefeller Center.

Position Type: Data Labs Intern - paid

Location: Washington D.C.

Sector: Policy Analysis

Start Date: Summer 2020

Wage or benefits: Undisclosed 

Time Commitment: Full-time, 12 week internship 

Desired Class Year: Students with at least two years of experience in computational scientific research

Desired Major or Interest:

Open to those that meet the following criteria:

• Experience interacting with web APIs, working with JSON data, and using regex preferred. 
• Experience with machine learning (e.g., SVM, Random Forests, GBRT/GBDT, ensemble methods, etc.) preferred. 

• Proficiency in R and/or Python (including Pandas, Scikit-learn, SciPy + NumPy) preferred. 
• Familiarity with natural language processing (preprocessing, term-document matrix representation, named entity recognition, POS taggers/parsers/etc.) preferred. 
• Familiarity working with audio as data preferred. 

Application Deadline:Rolling 

Organization website:https://www.pewresearch.org

Brief Description of the organization:

The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. They conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. The research center does not take political positions on issues. The organization follows U.S. politics and policy; journalism and media; internet, science and technology; religion and public life; Hispanic trends; global attitudes and trends; and U.S. social and demographic trends.

Brief Description of the Intern's role or key qualifications:

The internship is offered as a twelve-week summer program focused on producing a short-form original research project using data that the Labs team has already collected.

• A comprehensive collection of all Facebook and Twitter posts from members of Congress created between Jan. 2015 and Jan. 2020. The data contain the text of posts, attributes of the members who created each post, and measures of how the online audience engaged with them. 
• A collection of tweets, retweets, and quote-tweets generated by a representative sample of U.S. adult Twitter users linked with survey responses. The data contain the tweet text, a range of attributes for each Twitter user, and information about engagement with each tweet. 
• A set of sermons from U.S. Christian congregations delivered between April and June 2019 in both audio format and transcribed text format. 

How to apply:

Applicant should apply electronically and include a résumé and cover letter (describing your interest in the data and potential research questions/designs) to careers@pewresearch.org. As part of their cover letter, applicants should describe how they might use one of these datasets to answer an important research question.

This is an employment opportunity from outside the Rockefeller Center. Such opportunities are posted in an effort to help students find a leave-term internship experience in public policy or a social sciences related area. Such postings do not constitute an endorsement by the Center of the political objectives of any one person or organization.