Summer Apprenticeship
The summer apprenticeship program has three objectives:
- to provide additional experiential learning opportunities for students by engaging them in active research projects
- to support faculty research by training and supporting student research assistants
- to develop and identify students that can serve as tutors during the academic year.
In addition to projects involving statistical analysis, the program also supports research projects that use high performance computing tools, GIS, or involve computational textual analysis. Proposals are submitted by faculty whose research project requires the use of any of these tools.
Every spring semester, a week after the end of the add/drop period, a request for proposals (RFP) is sent to the faculty inviting project proposals where the faculty name the students they would like to sponsor. The expectation is that nominated students will have at least an introductory course where they used appropriate tools for the project (e.g. statistical analysis, programming, GIS etc.) Typically, the deadline for submitting a proposal is the beginning of the spring break. Following a review by the QAC Advisory Board the Center provides funding for the selected ones. Interested students should explore the apprenticeship research opportunities with faculty whose research matches their interests.
Students in the program are expected to be on campus for the duration of the apprenticeship (typically June and July), attend assigned workshops, work on the research tasks assigned to them by their faculty sponsors for the rest of the day, and participate in a poster presentation of their work at the end of July. Students in the statistical analysis portion will start with our “software boot camp” -- first four full days – and continue with daily morning classes/workshops on applied data analysis.