PORES Student Research Fellowship

 

The Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES) aims to train students in the quantitative social sciences. To that end, PORES solicits applications for its student research fellowship program on a regular basis. PORES fellowships run during each academic semester and over the summer, pairing Penn undergraduates with Penn faculty conducting research on political outcomes and policy effects in the United States and abroad, using election return, voter behavior, economic, and public opinion data.

 

 

About the Fellowships

The PORES student research fellowship is a paid position ($15/hour). During the academic year, students are expected to work an average of 10 hours per week for the duration of the semester. Summer fellows work 35 hours a week from the PORES suite in the PCPSE building on campus. As part of their fellowship, students may also have the opportunity to work on the NBC News Decision Desk.

Fellows' possible responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Collecting and organizing relevant data (e.g. from election officials, government organizations, data archives, or web scraping)

• Compiling, cleaning, and analyzing large datasets

• Helping to code and evaluate survey responses for sentiment analysis

• Writing memos or literature reviews that summarize previous academic research or news coverage

• Creating original data visualizations (e.g. plotting data of interest, mapping and analyzing geographies, or creating polished tables)

• Assisting in drafting survey questions and administration of polls

• Co-authoring publications for peer-reviewed journals or NBC News

 

Candidate Qualifications

Applicants should have an interest in public opinion research, politics, and voting habits. Students should be detail-oriented and have a strong writing background. While many projects may require fellows to already possess statistical and data analysis skills, some PORES fellowship positions are open to those with little experience in statistics. However, a strong interest in learning these skills is required.

In their application, students will be asked to highlight any previous experiences with:

• Data science coursework (e.g. in PSCI 1800, PSCI 1801, PSCI 3800, or PSCI 3802)

• Statistical / programming software (e.g. R, Python, Stata, SQL, or Java)

• Data visualization

• Spatial analytics (e.g. working with GIS data)

• Text analysis

• Machine learning

• Other technical skills

 

How to Apply

Our Summer 2025 Fellowship application is open now! 

Interested students should apply by Friday March 7th, 2025 at 11:59 p.m. using this Qualtrics form.

 

Applicants will be asked to upload a resume, a statement of interest, and a brief sample of their work.

• Applicants with limited or no data analysis experience should share a writing sample that best showcases their research writing. This could be a final paper, op-ed, or another assignment summarizing previous (or original) research.

• Applicants with data analysis experience should share a final project, problem set, or quantitative research paper for which they used statistical or programming software. It is typically most helpful for us to review a code script directly.

 

_______________________

Please email PORES Assistant Director Katie Steele at stkath@sas.upenn.edu with any questions about the PORES fellowship program.