Internship - Data

The Quality of Government Data section hosts an internship designed for students enrolled in a master’s program who would like to have hands-on application of data management in Stata and would like to learn how to use R and Python while dealing with topics related to Quality of Government.

In this internship, the student will have two main roles: first, they will be a direct contributor to our work by performing data wrangling tasks with Python and learning how the QoG data operation works, and second, they will be learning R and how this tool can be helpful to summarize and present data.

The student who joins this internship will be working together with our data team and will also be part of the wider QoG network and the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. Additionally, the student will have the opportunity to participate in seminars and other events organized at the Department of Political Science. The internship provides relevant experience particularly for students interested in the intersection of data and political science.

The main tasks of the internship are:

• Participate with data wrangling using Python
• Create summary information and short analysis for publication in our social media channels
• Create reports in R using R Markdown
• Create Shiny dashboards (if a 20-week internship or previous proficiency in R)

We accept students currently enrolled in a master’s program. We are looking for highly motivated, self-driven interns who are interested in Quality of Government as a research area with some knowledge of Pyhton. Given that this internship is aimed also at helping students get experience in using R, experience or knowledge of this program is not a requirement but willingness to learn and work with us is. Our working language is English. The internship is unpaid but students will receive academic credits.

Internship testimonies

Ilya Lavrov

Intern at QoG Data, Spring 2022

My name is Ilya Lavrov, I am a Master’s student of the Erasmus Mundus TISE programme and I was a summer intern at the Quality of Government Institute. I have a background in Political Science and I have always been interested in how political institutions of high quality are designed and what factors impact government effectiveness. Besides, I am keen on an academic career and would like to pursue a Ph.D. in Political Science, so this internship was a prime opportunity for me to take a look at how research institutes operate on the inside and gain practical experience in such an organisation.

During the internship, I was a member of the Data team. I have worked on modifying and improving the QoG Compilation Datasets. I have also updated the QoG data finder by adding more variables to it, proofreading, and adjusting variable definitions. Furthermore, I have helped several QoG professors with data collection. Overall, I had a great experience working with massive QoG datasets and I am glad that I was able to contribute to the QoG Data.

A large part of my internship was also educational. My mentor Natalia Alvarado Pachon taught me how to produce insightful and appealing visualisations in R and then I applied the acquired skills to make a series of tweets about E-governance around the world which was published on the QoG Twitter. Not only did I work with the dataset and create the plots and maps but I also created a content plan, conducted a literature review on the topic, and analysed various case studies. Overall, it was a valuable experience for me, during which I learned how to pitch my ideas and attract the readers’ attention with a limited amount of words, allowed by the platform.

All in all, I had a very positive experience during the internship. I expanded my knowledge on the impact of the quality of government on various policy areas. Moreover, I improved my quantitative research skills, related to managing, processing, analysing, and visualising data. The atmosphere in the team was always very supportive and I could freely choose which tasks to complete, based on my research interests. I am grateful to the entire QoG team and would love to collaborate with many of them in the future!