The Summer Internship 2017-2021

The Beginning

In the winter of 2016, Jun Won Park, then a PhD student at Yale’s School of Management in the organizational behavior program, and I hatched an idea for a summer internship program. During this time period it was fairly common for laboratories in psychology to advertise unpaid summer opportunities for research participation and we wanted to move away from this passion-based self-funded notion of research experience. Such a model reproduces inequality by making research experience accessible only to those with resources that can float their unpaid research pursuits over an entire summer.

That winter we put together a simple application portal via Qualtrics and advertised the opportunity via email listserv at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) and on Twitter. The initial application portal received more than 150 applications. From there we selected three interns for our inaugural program, wherein these researchers would be paid $20 per hour to work on research projects in collaboration with our lab (then just Jun Won and myself).

The internship ran for 8 weeks (from mid June to mid August), included a professional development curriculum (here) and completion of three independent research projects that served as some of the basis for a published research project (here). One of the co-authors (FG), was an intern from this initial class of the program. I paid for the program, which included salary, food, SPSP conference participation, transportation, and study materials out of my annual research and teaching budget (see here).

Growth and Expansion

Since its inaugural year the internship has seen growth and expansion. Every year the number of applications has risen past the prior year and the number of faculty mentors has continued to expand. By the final year (in 2021) the internship included 498 applicants, included 8 different faculty mentors over the program’s history, 15 graduate students who acted as informal mentors, across two departments at Yale (management and psychology).

The internship had also been transformed in that time to an officially recognized training program at Yale with an included stipend (versus hourly wages). At times, the funding of the program had also shifted away from individual faculty using their own research expenses to funding from the initiative on leadership in organizations, and in one year, the Deputy Dean’s office at the school of management (although this latter funding source was cancelled after one year due to fears about COVID-19 budgetary shortfalls).

Over the six years of the internship we have had 28 interns pass through our program. Many of the interns have stayed in touch and a subset have decided to go onto graduate programs in the social sciences. As of our last assessment, 12 of 12 of our interns who applied to a graduate program were admitted to at least one graduate program.

What is Next?

The summer internship will resume at Northwestern University in the Department of Psychology in the summer of 2025. There is a lot of work to do before then but you will be able to see updates here!