Shova KC, a Hope College senior from Kathmandu, Nepal, is one of only five students worldwide selected through a highly competitive international search for the Summer Intern Program of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).
ICPSR is the world's largest archive of digital social science data, and is a unit of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Founded in 1962, ICPSR is an organization of member institutions working together to acquire and preserve social science data, to provide open and equitable access to the data, and to promote effective data use.
During her internship, KC, who is an economics major at Hope, will work in a UNIX environment and gain experience using statistical programs such as SAS and SPSS to check data. She will also prepare social science data for permanent archiving and distribution for secondary analysis; help preserve respondent anonymity; and compose descriptions of data collections. In addition, she will attend courses in the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Science Research.
ICPSR accepts applications for its summer internship annually. This year's program will run 10 weeks, from Monday, June 12, through Friday, Aug. 18. KC's award includes a $3,000 stipend, room and board, and tuition for all coursework available through the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Science Research.
ICPSR's holdings span many areas, such as sociology, political science, demography, history, economics, gerontology, public health, criminal justice, substance abuse and mental health, education, health and medical care, and international relations. ICPSR's data is the foundation for thousands of research articles, reports and books, and findings from the data are put to use by scholars, policy analysts, policy makers, the media and the public.
More than 500 colleges and universities around the world, including Hope, are members of ICPSR.