Apprenticeship call for proposals for students


January 2025

Call for proposals

We are pleased to invite applications for the UCR Data Center Apprenticeship Program. This initiative falls under the Data Science and AI theme and aims to support faculty and staff in integrating the tools of data science and AI in their teaching, research, and administrative processes.

During the Apprenticeship Program, you will work on a project under the guidance of a faculty or staff member. The Data Center will offer training in the tools of data science and AI relevant for this project and support you through individual consultations. Participating students will receive credits in the form of an Academic Internship. Students welcome to apply irrespective of their experience in data science as long as they are motivated to learn.

The program has an intensive period of two weeks from January 13 to January 24, 2025. During these weeks, students receive relevant training in the mornings and work on the project in the afternoons. This part of the program ends with a poster presentation on January 24, 2025. The poster presentation is intended as a presentation of work in progress. You can find the presentations prepared during the first Apprenticeship Program and read more about the workshops we offer on our website. The projects are finished in the following semester; the details depend on the nature of the project.

We invite proposals for a variety of projects. The projects the Data Center has most experience with involve introducing data encounters in courses. Data encounters represent learning activities (big and small) in which students use the tools of data science in the context of their discipline. The center supports the development of these activities (e.g., prepares data and code), runs workshops, and holds office hours for students. You can find many examples from past UCR courses on our website.

Another type of projects we have experience with concerns UCR’s marketing and recruitment efforts. We hear many ideas on how we could excite prospective students about building their own program. Here is one example that involves the tools of data science (scroll down to the interactive chord diagram).

Finally, we also welcome projects in which students support faculty in their research, as well as other projects we have not thought of.

If you have an interest in any of these types of projects, or have an idea of your own, please email us at datacenter@ucr.nl by November 18, 2024. If possible, please discuss your idea beforehand with a faculty or staff member who could supervise your project, but you are also welcome to apply without a faculty member in mind. If you would like to discuss your ideas and interests with us before applying, you are welcome to.

We cannot guarantee that we will be able to match you with a faculty or staff member, but we will do our best to do so. We will inform you by December 1, 2024 about whether you are accepted to the apprenticeship program and what your project will be.

The application form (at the bottom of this call) asks you to briefly describe the types of projects you would be interested in. If you have a specific project in mind, please describe it. If you are open to different types of projects, please describe your interests.

We look forward to receiving your applications!

Alexei Karas

Tina Rozsos

Application form

Note: Please send us this information even if a faculty member has already nominated you in their application.

  1. Your name
  2. What kinds of projects are you interested in? (e.g. data encounters in which tracks)
  3. What is your background in data science? (e.g. DATA/COMP courses completed, preferred coding languages, etc.)
  4. What is your background in the track(s) you are interested in?
  5. Please briefly explain your motivation for participating in the Apprenticeship program (one paragraph).