Several School of Information master’s students are spending this summer working with non-profit or public interest organizations, thanks to support from the School’s non-profit internship grant.
Dave Lester is working as a software engineer intern at Common Crawl, a new non-profit that is building an open crawl of the web and making billions of web pages accessible to developers and researchers.
“An advantage of Berkeley’s I School is its proximity and connections with industry in the Bay Area,” observed Lester. “This internship is similarly proving to be a valuable experience meeting new people and helping to define the future technologies that we’ll use.”
His classmate Ryan McAdam is a design research intern this summer at Lybba, a healthcare non-profit which is building an open-source health and learning network for personalized medicine that is scalable, affordable, and broadly available.
“This internship with Lybba represents one of the primary reasons I decided to attend the I School,” said McAdam. “I wanted to explore how I could apply my skills and knowledge to meaningful projects that have a chance to effect positive change in peoples’ lives.”
So far, Ryan McAdam has found that his internship has helped complement what he has learned at the I School.
“As a multi-disciplinary program, the I School prepares students for approaching real-world issues by applying both theory and practice,” said McAdam. “For example, the core classes offered me a ‘big picture’ perspective which informs a framework for me to think about the larger societal impact of decisions. It’s exciting to be applying this knowledge.”
His classmate Dave Lester agreed. “Last semester I took the I School course on data mining and analytics, and my internship is a chance to apply and expand what I learned during my first year,” said Lester.
“In order to process terabytes of data, new frameworks like Hadoop are rapidly evolving,” said Lester. “This internship is a chance to dig deeper than I could during a semester.”
Both Lester and McAdam credit the I School’s grant program with enabling them to pursue their internships.
“As a non-profit, Lybba can’t compete with the kind of capital accessible to start-ups or tech companies,” explained McAdam. “The I School grant supported a creative way for me to pursue a summer internship without having to cast around for other funding.”
“Without this support from the I School, it’s doubtful that I would have been able to make this kind of commitment to Lybba,” he said.
Lester agreed. “I think it speaks volumes about the I School’s commitment to a diverse set of career paths for its students, and I’m grateful to have received support to pursue this unique opportunity.”
