Undergraduate Summer Internship

Undergraduate Summer Internship

The Department of Statistics offers a Summer Internship in Applied Statistics to undergraduate students who will be enrolled at Columbia College, Columbia School of General Studies, Barnard College, or the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science in the Fall of 2012.

Interns take part in the Department consulting
service and participate in mentored research with Department faculty. The internship takes place from May 21st through June 29th. Interns receive student housing and a stipend of $3,000.

Review of applications will begin April 9th. Applicants should send a transcript with a cover letter to

Ms. Dood Kalicharan, Department of Statistics, 1255 Amsterdam Avenue, Room 1005, School of Social Work Building, New York, NY 10027

In the cover letter, please indicate your interest in one of the project areas described below. Please also indicate if you applied in previous years.  Preference is given to students with course work in statistics, and to repeat applicants.

Project 1: Journal Policies and Reproducible Research

There is a growing movement within the computational sciences to make available both the code and the data that generated published scientific results.  The idea is that doing so renders the discoveries reproducible. This project examines journal code and data publication policies and requirements and their role in encouraging reproducible computational research.

Project 2: Patents and Scientific Code

As scientists increasingly rely on computation as a key part of their research toolbox, they are using and generating more code than ever before. Researchers are under pressure to openly share this code so that their published results are reproducible by others, and they can also be under pressure to patent the code and license it to potential users for financial gain. This project seeks to quantify this tension and analyze university intellectual property policy regarding the

sharing and licensing of academic code.

Project 3: Statistical Methods and Applications in Genetic Epidemiology

Methods development and analysis of data from clinical epidemiologic studies involving family-data, genome-wide genotype information, and longitudinal data collection.  Students interested in this project should indicate in their cover letter their experience with statistics packages and their programming skills.

Opportunities for Undergraduate and M.A. Students

Victor De la Peña
Students will have the possibility of working on projects involving applications of Probability and Statistics to Problems in Earth Sciences including projects such as the tele-conections between El Nino and the Indian Monsoon.

Andrew Gelman
Several projects involving political science, economics, sociology, psychology, public health, and policy; for examples, see http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/.

Daniel Rabinowitz
A variety of opportunities for supervised experience in data analysis in support of research projects in the Arts & Sciences, the School of Public Health, the School of Social work, and the Medical and Nursing Schools.

Dr. Tian Zheng
Research experience for undergraduates/Master students: Projects from various areas in statistical genetics, bioinformatics, and computational biology are available for undergraduates and MA/MS students. Students who are interested should be comfortable with statistical inference concepts and basic computer programming.