The N8 CIR Summer Internships were developed to help undergraduates at universities within the N8 Research Partnership explore research and career opportunities. There was a particular focus on raising awareness of roles that people may not have previously been aware of, such as research software engineers or data scientists.
Each of the 24 interns received a generous stipend and, more importantly, help and support from experienced colleagues in their respective university’s computer science, research software engineering, high-performance computing (HPC), or IT teams.
One of the most exciting aspects of the internships was the wide range of projects that were completed. Along with traditional interests in HPC and coding, there were some fascinating applications of AI to existing problems and developments, as well as improvements to mobile applications.
It was particularly heartening to see a number of projects focused on the humanities progress over the eight weeks of the internship. One intern used AI to help provide normalised spellings of words in early English books, whilst another used AI vision to create an app that provided sentiment analysis of images from an online art history corpus.
Even more excitingly, many of the interns are now actively considering careers in roles such as research software engineering. In some cases, this was a role that the interns didn’t know existed.
‘This internship has provided me with another insight into a career that I had not heard of beforehand, providing another potential path for the future.’
‘I will definitely consider a career in digital humanities in the future. Working with large datasets has been such a fun and interesting challenge.’
Professor Matt Probert, Programme Director of N8 CIR said, ‘Bringing the interns together to hear about their research, conclusion, and experience of the N8 CIR Summer Internship has been really inspiring. Hearing from the next generation of researchers and research technical professionals about their ideas, approaches, and solutions shows that the future is in good hands.’
You can read more about the summer 2025 Summer Internships on the N8 CIR website at: https://n8cir.org.uk/themes/internships/
Recordings of the interns’ presentations will also be made available on our YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/n8cir. Please do like and subscribe to receive notifications of when they’re posted.