The WEHI Research Computing Platform regularly provides unpaid student internship opportunities through the University of Melbourne Data Science and Software Engineering programs. These internships are 100% remote.
We have had 169 students through the program since Semester 2, 2021 who have provided over 18 person years of effort to help us uncover and document complexity early in over 20 projects.
Out of the 14 anonymous reviews that have been given by students as at 11th of October 2024, our internships have been rated a 4.7 out of 5.
Please note applications for Faculty of Science has closed for the summer as we have had over 90 students apply.
- Engineering and IT: start and end dates are from 25 November to 21 February for around 24 hours per week.
- Faculty of Science: start and end dates are from 25 November to 21 February for around 8 hours per week.
- Final Presentations are due week of the 17th of February for all students. Practice presentations will be done the week of the 10th February.
- Please read through this page to see the list of projects and how to apply.
We prepare students for the real-world by teaching them:
- how understanding the domain problem and the users is more important than technical skills, and how to work on a complex, ambiguous project,
- showing them how to become as independent as possible,
- show them how to document and share knowledge to others in a professional manner,
- explain how a software maturity model can help clarify expectations, and
- teaching them how to work productively in a remote environment.
We even tell students how to try to avoid the top 5 mistakes that students make.
Many of the projects work in the Data Analysis and Research Software Engineering space using High Performance Compute (HPC). We work across diverse projects such as imaging, cryo-EM, genomics, transcriptomics, clinical informatics, and capacity planning.
We mainly work with projects that use R and Shiny, Python, Julia, bash, while also making the most out of other technologies such as RStudio, Jupyter notebooks, PowerBI and other applications within the data analytics space.
Here are some of the recurring student intern projects and new projects we are working on.
Sometimes, we are in contact with students who cannot get course credit and are extremely keen to volunteer as an open source software contributor. In these situations, we have to be careful we do not act in an exploitative way. This is why we have written our expectations of potential open source contributors to make the expectations more transparent.
You can listen to two students talk about their projects (click image below).
{:width="400px"}To understand more about the program, you can read:
- the RCP Student Internship Program Handbook,
- the RCP Code of Conduct,
- the Social Media Policy for student interns,
- the online FAQ, and
- the key milestones and emails for the projects
- We suggest that you write a 1 page cover letter introducing yourself. We also have material on how to write a good cover letter and what to look for when you are writing a resume.
- View the intake dates here
- Further details on how to apply are here.