Summer Internship - Data Scientist Intern, In Our Backyards (NYC or Remote)

Key Skills

D3.js, Looker, Pandas, Python Programming, SQL, Tableau

Job Description

Who you are:

The Data Scientist Intern for In Our Backyards (IOB) is an opportunity for a college student or recent college grad to immerse themselves into working a full-time data role at non-profit organization. Their work on the In Our Backyards team within Vera will support federal, state and local advocacy and technical assistance meant to reverse the rise of incarceration in smaller cities and rural communities.

The data science intern will participate in all day-to-day team activities, ranging from project and sprint planning, code review sessions, pair programming, social activities, and more. They will be directly mentored by a data scientist on the team, who will help train the intern on a range of responsibilities, including data collection, processing and analysis, and building data analytics products.

In addition to day-to-day data tasks, the intern will develop a project that they will work on over the course of their internship that is relevant to their interests and experience. This might involve helping to design and manage large-scale software systems or it could involve creating data science models or new tools to empower our community partners to leverage and improve Vera’s existing repository of incarceration data. Other day-to-day tasks may include exploratory or predictive analyses, data ingestion and computational infrastructure, analytical software development, web scraping, and producing data visualizations.

Schedule

The intern should be available to work up to 35 hours per week during the summer. The dates will be between June 6th and August 12th with some flexibility to accommodate personal and academic schedules.

Compensation

The compensation range for internships is $16.00 - $25.00, per hour. Actual compensation will vary depending on factors including but not limited to experience and performance. Applicants may choose to receive academic credit. For those who need to earn academic credit, Vera will gladly assist in working with the school or program to make arrangements and meet requirements.

How to apply

Please submit cover letter and resume. In your cover letter, please explain why you are passionate about criminal justice reform and what you hope to gain from this internship.

In this role, you will:

Data analysis

• Integrate external sources of criminal justice data with our internally collected data; clean, analyze and visualize data for team and public use.

Community Partnerships

• Provide consultation to other groups at Vera with technical needs. Support community partners with customized data and analysis.

Programming and code review

• Help maintain existing codebase

What qualifications do you need

Required:

• Demonstrated proficiency working with data collection, processing, and statistical analysis in Python, with preference for experience using SQL and Python Pandas library.
• Experience using Tableau, Looker, D3, Python or similar tools to visualize complex data for both fellow data scientists and non-technical audiences.
• Commitment to advancing racial and gender equity in work
• Curiosity about emerging research and advocacy in the criminal justice space
• Wrestles with creative and concrete ways to use data to shift power and advance equity and inclusion

Preferred:

• Professional, personal or academic engagement with issues of mass incarceration and mass criminalization