Welcome to the summer psychology internship!
Take a closer look at our internship program and learn more about our most recent class of interns.
Take a closer look at our internship program and learn more about our most recent class of interns.
Learn about how we started our internship at this blog post which includes financial details as well as course materials including a syllabus here. If you want to get a start on an application portal here is our most recent application. At Northwestern, we now partner with the Summer Research Opportunities Program, which includes set amounts for a stipend (currently $6,500) and lodging on campus as well as travel expenses.
You can read about some of the promising outcomes after the fourth year of our internship here. You can also read an update from 2022 here. Importantly, 12 of the 12 interns that applied to graduate programs were admitted to at least one program.
Student interns would have one faculty mentor and one graduate student advisor (called a sibling). For the research, students worked with a faculty mentor and graduate student to push forward a research project in a collaborative learning environment. The student would then present the result of the summer activities in a seminar in the closing week of the internship.
During the time of this research project collaboration students would also attend weekly seminars hosted by a faculty advisor. The seminars would involve the faculty member discussing a paper they wrote, and one that inspired them. The students would also take part in professional development sessions throughout the week. These sessions involved orientations to things like survey design, graduate school life, literature searches, and data analysis using the program R.
Student interns, graduate students, and faculty are equal partners in our internship. This means that everyone works together to create a community of honesty, learning, and growth. Grad students and faculty are encouraged to be themselves— to highlight the ways that the job is hard as well as why they continue. For this reason, graduate students who participate in the internship are compensated for their labor.
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. One of the co-authors, 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.
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.
In 2025, the summer internship begins anew at Northwestern in the Department of Psychology. The internship is now a partnership with the Northwestern Summer Research Opportunities Program and we are excited to combine our collective efforts to support student opportunities in an effort to expand psychology.