ISR Survey Research Center Director William Axinn meets with SRC interns to discuss their research activities and career plans. Image credit: Eva MenezesANN ARBOR—An internship program that provides students with hands-on experience designing, conducting and analyzing surveys is celebrating its 10th anniversary July 31 with a symposium showcasing the research of current interns and a dinner for alumni and friends.

The program, sponsored by the Survey Research Center at the U-M Institute for Social Research, was established in 2003 to build relationships with promising scholars and promote diversity. More than 50 students from around the nation have participated in the last decade, working with ISR research faculty in a variety of academic disciplines. The experience has kick-started scores of careers and kicked off a number of long-lasting friendships and professional collaborations between interns and faculty mentors.

“Many of our former interns are doing fantastic things—teaching, attending top-tier grad schools and helping to conduct surveys and other social science research around the world,” said George Myers, manager of diversity initiatives at the ISR Survey Research Center, and director of the internship program since its inception.

“I love working with interns from this program in the summers,” said Kira Birditt, a research assistant professor in the ISR Life Course Development Program, who has served as a mentor since the program began. “Because the interns work full-time, we have the chance to work on in-depth projects, and we get a lot done.”

Over the years, interns from the program have worked on coding and analyzing survey data, helped with grant-writing and even co-authored papers with Birditt.

ISR Survey Research Center Summer Internship Program Director George Myers and interns from both the SRC program and the Summer Intern program sponsored by the ISR Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) listen to a presentation about the Survey Research Operations unit. Image credit: Eva MenezesSummer intern Monique Kelly who plans to attend graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, in the fall, has been working with ISR research professor Fred Conrad, who heads the Michigan Program in Survey Methodology. She has been helping to analyze data from Conrad’s iPhone study. The preliminary findings, presented this spring at the American Association for Public Opinion Research, received international media coverage (www.sampler.isr.umich.edu/2012/research/texting-ups-truthfulness-new-iphone-study-suggests).

“This internship was a great experience for me,” said former intern Lisa Marchiondo, who completed a Ph.D. in psychology at U-M this year and will be starting a position as assistant professor of psychology at Wayne State University later this summer.

Last summer, Marchiondo worked with Gwenith Fisher, an associate research scientist at ISR, merging the ISR Health and Retirement Study with a large national database of occupational information. Now Marchiondo and Fisher are continuing their collaboration, analyzing the rich dataset.

“Working with Gwen gave me valuable additional skills, and her support as a mentor was really important as I moved into the job market,” said Marchiondo, who won the 2011-2012 Robert Kahn Fellowship for the Scientific Study of Social Issues, for her research on rudeness in the workplace (www.sampler.isr.umich.edu/2012/next-generation/lisa-marchiondo-researching-rudeness-in-the-workplace).

The symposium, which will be held at noon July 31 at ISR-Thompson Room 6050, is free and open to the public.

For more information about the ISR Survey Research Center Summer Internship program, including details about how to apply, visit the program website: http://sites.isr.umich.edu/DNN/Default.aspx?alias=sites.isr.umich.edu/dnn/sip

Established in 1949, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research is the world’s largest academic social science survey and research organization, and a world leader in developing and applying social science methodology, and in educating researchers and students from around the world. ISR conducts some of the most widely cited studies in the nation, including the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, the American National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, the world’s largest digital social science data archive. For more information, visit the ISR website at www.isr.umich.edu.