This is probably one of the geekiest things I’ll talk about on this blog so bear with me. The summer of 2019, I had the amazing opportunity to intern at the Department of Mathematics and statistic in the University of Melbourne. The internship was part of the Vacation scholarship program and ran for a month. This was a research program so in order to apply, all the applicants had to find a supervisor who had a research project we could take part in.
My project consisted of converting code from R( a statistical software) to python. This is where it gets extremely geeky. I looked at computing the maximum likelihood estimates (MLE) for conditional Gaussian copulas. These MLE simulations are used to understand the behavior of a new copula model that uses spatial data. Okay that was a lot of big words and it’s alright if you don’t understand half of it. In short, I used the code to compute some estimates that would help my supervisor in his research.
Working as an intern was super fun. The program doesn’t have strict working hours, so it gave me a lot of flexibility. I met a lot of amazing and talented people, and also learned so much about applied statistics. Working with a supervisor is also a wonderful experience as there’s so much advise and knowledge you can gain from them.
Summer internships are a great way to gain experience and find out more about real life experience of your subject area. I would advise waiting till your second year to take an internship though, so you have more knowledge to apply. Always keep a look out for these opportunities, but don’t be disappointed if you don’t get in. I failed quite a lot of interviews before I finally landed this internship! What’s life without a few failures! Just keep trying and you’ll get there :)
I hope my experience gave you some insight on the type of projects you could work on as a university student.
Lots of love,
and don't be too geeked out,
Nethmi
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