There has been a huge growth in the demand for graduates who have data skills that they can apply to real world problems in the work place. This has been identified as a national priority, with a noting “the supply of graduates with specialist data skills from universities is limited”. To address this need, the UCL Social Data Institute offers some of the most extensive training in social data methods to undergraduates in the UK.
As part of this training, our internship programme gives undergraduate students the opportunity to use their skills in organisations including the Financial Times, The Economist, charities and policy organisations and think-tanks such as the Climate Policy Initiative.
This ‘real-world’ experience sees students doing valuable work across sectors and topics analysing data sets to visualise and present data information in support of media articles, research papers and reports.
As well as applying their data science skills, we encourage students to become active citizens of London. In 2022 we partnered with Islington Council.
Our interns contributed to two of the council’s flagship projects: ‘Let’s Talk Islington’ and ‘People Friendly Streets’. Common to both was a large volume of data collected from residents in the borough that needed to be analysed and communicated though maps and other visualisations, to help shape policy.
Let’s Talk Islington culminated in an exhibition attended by the public and policy makers and featured the work of intern Lola, a second year Political Science student. The exhibition highlighted areas of inequality in the borough and will be used to inform policies on how to tackle this going forward. Analysis from interns Dylan and Mana, also second year Political Science students, fed into a report considering the council-wide impacts of the People Friendly Streets programme based on monitoring data as well as engagement data collected throughout the implementation of the programme and via public consultations.
The scheme is expanding, and we are looking to partner with more employers to host an intern for 6 ēĉ8 weeks this summer. If this is of interest, please take a look at our and get in touch to discuss further.