Deadline: Jan 28, 2022
Deadline: Jan 28, 2022
Deadline: Jan 28, 2022
Deadline: Jan 21, 2022
DSSG (at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh) will begin May 30, 2022 and end August 19, 2022
The summer program is an in-person, full-time, 12-week program where fellows work in teams supported by full-time senior data science mentors and project managers as well as attend workshops, lectures, and other activities. As of now, we don’t believe we can replicate this experience in a virtual setting and we are planning on holding an in-person program in the summer of 2022. As the COVID-19 situation changes, we will follow university and government guidelines and adjust our plans accordingly. We will also follow CMU guidelines around vaccination requirements for the participants.
The Fellowship is a project-based training program designed to produce data scientists and Ml/AI practitioners with strong skills in solving real-world problems and an understanding, excitement, and passion for solving problems with social impact. We have three goals (prioritized in that order):
- Training Fellows: We want to help create the next generation of data scientists who have the data science skills to solve real-world problems and are passionate about focusing their efforts on solving social challenges.
- Exposing and training governments and non profits to better use data to make better decisions.
- Community: Seeding a community of people and organizations working together to make an impact.
Collaborative, Ethical, and Inclusive. We know we don’t know everything and want everyone involved to shape the Fellowship. We’re open to ideas, criticism, and help. Yes, we are data-driven but more than that, we’re problem-driven. We care about impact and how our work is used to improve society in a fair and equitable manner.
Most of the summer, Fellows work with their team on their project. We augment that with lectures, hands-on workshops, seminars (from local and visiting guests), happy hours (with the local tech, data science, non-profit, and government communities), meet-ups, field trips, and other social activities (sailing trips, tours, concerts, etc.). Some of these are planned in advance, others are co-created and led by the Fellows and mentors as they learn about what they would like to do over the summer.
We try to balance getting things done with learning and training. We believe that the best way to learn is by doing, and the fellows who join us want to make an impact by solving the problem they’re tackling.
DSSG 2022 will take place at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA
Links to the applications for the 2022 program is at the top of this page
There is no single profile for an ideal fellow. Successful Fellows have different skill profiles and backgrounds in order to create a collaborative community. Everyone has some programming, statistics and data analysis skills in addition to a passion for making social impact. Some are stronger at Computer Science and Machine Learning. Others have a strong Applied Math or Statistics background. Some come from a quantitative Social Science, Economics, or Public Policy background. Others have Physics or Chemistry or Geography or Linguistics degrees. We’re not expecting you to be awesome at everything. Tell us what you’re good at and what you’d like to learn. In addition, personality and communication skills matter! If you’re passionate about a cause or social issue, tell us about it in your application. If there’s a recent project you’ve done that you’re proud of, we’d like to hear about it.
Although we’d love to have people at all levels involved, we prefer you to be a graduate student or at least a senior in college to get the most out of this program. This is because we have learned over the years that fellows with prior skills are able to both get the most out of their experience, as well as contribute the most. That said, if you feel like you may not fit the typical criteria of a Fellow, but have both the computational skills and passion to excel, we’d still love to see your application.
Typically, we get 600-1000 applications for 24-40 positions
Your recommenders should be the two people who know you and your work best. This can be your advisor or professor, or your work/research manager. It is not necessary that they are faculty members at your university, but we recommend getting letters from people that can comment on your academic background, practical skills in data science, your ability to communicate and collaborate effectively, and your passion for social impact.
If necessary, yes. Please do the following:
1) Send the link to the new reference.
2) Send us the name of, contact info of, and your relation to the new reference at dssg at datascienceforsocialgood dot org.
3) Send us the name and contact info of the reference you’d like to remove at dssg at datascienceforsocialgood dot org.
We’d rather you give us a few project ideas than one detailed, specific, project proposal. We can then work with you to better understand the potential projects to select the one that best fits the fellowship.
Fellow applications close at midnight in the latest timezone on earth.
Any recommendations submitted after the deadline will be added to your application, but reviewers can only take into account information available to them at the time of review so we highly recommend you ensure your recommendations are in before the deadline.
We will communicate your application status in several emails leading up to the application deadline to inform you whether we are still missing parts of the application or recommendations.
Once the application deadline has passed, we review applications using a rolling process. The review period is an extremely busy time for us, which is why we cannot respond to requests on the status of individual applications. Please see the question below for details when you can expect a response.
Once applications close the 31st of January, we will start the rolling review process aiming for the following dates.
- First week of February: initial review round starts
- Last week of February: review round completed, all applicants moved to interview round or notified
- Mid February to mid March: interviews
- Late March: decision emails sent out (acceptances, places on the waiting list, or rejections)
- First week of April: final Fellow group confirmed
No, not at all! We love CS geeks but in order to solve high impact problems, we need teams with a broad set of skills. We want people from all kinds of backgrounds including sociology, economics, public policy, public health, geography, physics, and chemistry. However, we do want you to have experience with programming, data analysis and a passion for making social impact. That means that applicants should have had some prior experience using a programming language (such as Python) to analyze data
Not necessarily but this is designed for current student or recent graduates. If you have finished a degree (undergrad, Masters, PhD) in the past couple of years, you should be ok to apply. We’ve had post-docs, as well as people in industry (recent graduates), and people in between undergrad and gradschool come as fellows in previous years.
No, you don’t have to be a US citizen to apply. We have sponsored J-1 visas (for those outside the US) in the past as well as had F-1 students already in the US use CPT to be part of the fellowship.
We can’t provide funds for visa applications but can definitely send a supporting letter if required.
Yes, the fellowship is paid. The stipends are fixed but vary by the cost of living of the fellowship location. For Pittsburgh, the stipend is $10000 for the summer and should be more than enough to cover travel, housing, and other expenses over the summer.
While budgeting for the program, please keep in mind that the stipend qualifies as taxable income. Due to our large number of international fellows, we cannot advise on the tax implications related to the stipend. We recommend consulting with a lawyer for tax-related questions/concerns.
We are working on organizing housing for 2020. Please check back later.
No. We can make some exceptions for up to 2 days off during the summer (for critical cases), but spending a week away from the work is not fair to the other fellows on your team. If you need to be away for a week during the summer, this may not be the summer for you to participate in DSSG. In addition, everyone must be in attendance for the entire first week and last week of the fellowship.
Partially. We spend the months leading up the Fellowship designing projects with project partners. Once the Fellows are selected, we will send you a list of these projects and ask you to give us your preferences. We’ll then use these preferences and the needs of the projects to create project teams.
You can see past projects from last year here. Projects will be in partnership with government and non profit organizations and will be in areas of education, healthcare, energy, community development, disaster relief, and public safety.
A lot of the project teams end up writing papers but that’s not the goal of the summer fellowship. We encourage people to do good work with real impact and the paper is often a by-product of that good work
An ideal mentor has a strong technical background, typically PhD (in Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Social Science, or Public Policy) and 5+ years of industry experience. We want mentors to have real-world problem solving experience as well as experience in leading teams and working with students and industry partners.
In the past years, we’ve had a mix of successful mentors from Industry and Academia (with practical, real-world experience) with PhDs in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Social Science, Economics, and Physics.
See more details on mentors.
Our priority is to have full-time mentors. These are paid, full-time positions. If you want to help in a part-time capacity, please contact us separately to see how we can get you involved.
Mentors are a critical component of the Fellowship. Each mentor leads (typically two) teams of Fellows and serves as a project lead and technical adviser. Mentors also help us design the activities over the summer and are an integral part of the organizing team.
Project Partners are typically, but not always, non-profits and government organizations (city, state, or federal – US or international). We also work with corporations and startups with a social mission.
Project Partners come with some idea of a problem they want help in tackling, data they can provide to solve that problem, and resources they can devote to collaborate with us over the summer. Ideal partners:
1. Have an important problem with high social impact: We want concrete problems that can have impact as opposed to vague research questions
2. Can give us access to data they’ve collected that is useful in solving that problem: It’s less about the size of the data, more about having the right data to solve the problem. We don’t release the data publicly and comply with any security and privacy procedures necessary but we need to be able to access the data remotely from Chicago.
3. Provide expertise about the problem area to the team of Fellows: We are not experts in all “social good” areas and expect partners (who are the experts) to help us understand the data and the problem.
4. Are likely to implement and use the work we produce over the summer: We want our work to be used and having committed partners is critical for that to happen.
We want to make an impact and want to work with partners who can best use our skills and resources to make that happen.
More questions? See our post on what makes a good DSSG project.
All of them. In the past years, we’ve worked in various areas such as education, public health, medicine, sustainability, public safety, economic development, international aid, homelessness prevention, and public accountability.
We like concrete problems but can help you define and scope the project. We’re okay with starting with an interest in working with us and will spend time with you before the Fellowship starts to refine projects and discuss data needs. You can also propose several project ideas and we can help narrowing them down to the one we think will best fit within the Fellowship.
Not at all. We’ve worked with partners all over the world. In-person collaboration is great but so is Slack, Zoom, Skype and/or Hangout. We do expect project partners to visit in-person at the beginning and end of the fellowship.
See our recent parners here.
You get to work with a team of 3-4 smart, passionate Data Science Fellows led by an experienced mentor for 12 weeks to solve the problem we identify together.
Project Managers are paid, full-time positions.
An ideal project manager has a strong technical background and exposure to technology or data science projects, and several years of industry or consulting experience. We want people who are used to working in an agile, fast paced, start-up like environments with experience managing multiple projects at once.
- Nurse-Family Partnership is a non-profit organization that sends nurses to meet with new and expectant mothers. DSSG has worked with NFP to estimate their impact on health outcomes for a funding proposal, and to predict which mothers are at highest risk of dropping out of the program.
- DSSG has worked with several school districts to develop early warning indicators for high school dropouts and college undermatching.
- A team of DSSG Fellows worked with the Chicago Department of Public Health to identify high-risk buildings to target for proactive lead paint inspections.
- The Office of the Presidency of Mexico engaged DSSG to identify risk factors driving high rates of maternal mortality.
No. While we appreciate individuals interested in part-time or volunteer positions, we can only accept applicants able to work full-time for the duration of the summer.
Project managers manage 4 projects simultaneously with 4 different project partners (clients) and a team of 12 -16 fellows.
Interns help us keep the program running while getting exposure to the DSSG projects, fellows, staff, and partners. They help us with administrative tasks and event setup, from setting up the physical space for the summer to staffing the DSSG conference- any experience with event planning, grant writing, data science, or computer science is appreciated.
Interns are full-time, paid positions.
Yes, we are hosting information sessions – watch our website for dates.
If you are certain that your question is not covered in the Frequently Asked Questions, contact us. If your question is in the FAQs, we may give you a hard time about it and may not answer your email