Education Analytics strives to deliver sophisticated, research-informed analytics to educators and school administrators to support their work in improving student outcomes. To best support them, the data they receive must be accurate, up to date, secure, and easily accessible. Summer interns in this role will have a unique opportunity to learn and contribute to the data systems that support this mission.

We are seeking Summer Interns for the Data Engineering team who are motivated to learn the technical skills and concepts needed to build data systems for analytics in K12 Education. For this role, we are seeking candidates who may not yet have experience in the data engineering field but have demonstrated programming skills and an interest in working with data. In this role, a successful candidate will build skills in data engineering and analytics engineering. We’re looking for someone who is interested in learning data modeling concepts and building data systems and data products that are user-friendly and reliable.

Interns will work closely with our full-time data engineering staff to support the timely delivery of data and analytics to educators and administrators who use this data to drive change and improvement in education. We are looking for candidates who are innovative, hard-working, and curious to help us continue to develop our team's capacity in the development and use of cutting-edge tools. Successful Interns will be driven to learn, understand, and challenge these tools and the engineering practices they support. Our current stack uses an ELT approach via Apache Airflow and dbt to create data warehouses in Snowflake or Postgres, depending on the scale of the data. These blog posts on our website illustrate some projects that someone on our team might work on.

• https://www.edanalytics.org/blog/insights-from-eas-2024-internship-cohort

• https://www.edanalytics.org/blog/building-a-multi-source-analytics-database-to-support-teachers-during-covid-19

• https://www.edanalytics.org/blog/turning-public-data-into-custom-insights-how-ea-has-built-a-public-data-platform-for-our-partners

Please tell us about your interests and aspirations in your application. We are encouraging candidates without any data engineering experience to apply, so the application will help us understand why you are a strong candidate for this position.

This opportunity is a fully onsite role based out of our office in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. The wage for this position is $22/hour and includes an additional housing stipend for hybrid/onsite roles. The program runs from June 2 – August 15, with flexibility for the right candidate.

Expectations and logistics of the role:

• Interns are expected to work 40 hours a week for at least ten weeks. Specific schedules will be determined by the supervisor/mentor.

• Interns are paired with a mentor from their teams for the summer. These mentors serve as the intern’s main point of contact, help assign interns work, support them as they plan out projects, answer their questions, help them manage their time, and provide additional one-on-one support.

• Through a series of interactive lunches and workshops, interns get a first-hand look at all the functions of EA and greater insight into nonprofit work.

• Attend professional development seminars to learn about professional development topics

Some things you might learn and experience during your internship:

• Implement and design data warehousing structures for research, analytics, and reporting/dashboarding

• Apply best practices from software engineering to building data pipelines

• Help implement code testing, continuous integration, and deployment strategies to ensure system reliability

• Implement complex pipelines to integrate data coming from a mix of APIs, flat files, or other database sources

• Participate in the Intern Final Project, an independent hands-on learning experience, and share results and findings to all EA colleagues at the end of the internship.

Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing Bachelor’s Degree (entering junior or senior year preferred), Graduate Degree, or working towards a programming or data-related bootcamp certification or transitioning careers

• Studying Computer Science, Data Science, Software Engineering, Statistics, or a related field preferred but not required

• Some experience programming, Python preferred but not required

• Some exposure to or interest in working with data, knowledge of SQL preferred but not required

• Some experience working with version control software preferred, ideally using Github

How you will successfully onboard in this role:

In your first few weeks, you will work through a training exercise our team has developed that familiarizes our new hires with our development setup & tooling, and join team meetings and 1-1 check-ins. Depending on your background, we also have resources available to learn specific technologies that we use at EA. You will work with an assigned mentor on the data engineering team who will serve as your guide and be a part of a guided internship program across Education Analytics. From there, you will have the opportunity to join project meetings to gain familiarity with the context of the work we do. You will also be assigned a personal project based on your interests that you will lead and present to the organization at the end of the internship.

Work Environment and Requirements:

• Ability to communicate effectively in numerous conversations throughout the day on the telephone, in writing, on-line zoom and in person to provide information, collaboration and assistance.

• Ability to reach in all directions and bend/stoop to store and retrieve files, use telephone, calculator, computer, and other office equipment.

• Dexterity and hand/eye coordination necessary to operate computer keyboard and other office equipment.

• Ability to complete job duties where there may be eyestrain due to constant viewing of computer screens.

• Ability to complete job duties in an environment where background noise and frequent interruptions are consistent.

• Demonstrate the ability to utilize basic math skills of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

• Must be able to communicate effectively both orally and in writing, follow instructions and be able to comprehend written material or requests.

• Must demonstrate the ability to use reason and problem-solving skills in a fast-paced environment.

About us:

Education Analytics (EA) is a non-profit organization based in Madison, WI that creates research-informed analytics to support school districts, regional offices of education, non-profits, and policymakers in improving student outcomes and education systems with data-driven decision making.

Additional Details:

Education Analytics is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

The job duties, responsibilities, skills, experience, educational factors and the requirements and conditions listed in this job description are representative only and not exhaustive of the tasks that an employee may be required to perform. The employer reserves the right to revise this job description at any time and require employees to perform other tasks as circumstances or conditions of its business, competitive considerations or the work environment change.