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Internships
Motu offers summer internships for students completing their degree and planning to return to graduate study. The key characteristics we are seeking are intelligence, motivation, and interest in the issues we study.
Summer internships
All internships are filled for summer 2010/11.
Motu’s internship programme is designed to apply and extend students’ empirical skills and assist their development as researchers. Its overriding aim is to build local research capacity, improving young researchers’ skills and improving the quality of New Zealand research.
We aim to involve our interns in our work in ways that help them understand the public policy and research issues involved. Internships build students’ skills, as well as providing our researchers with useful research assistance. Ultimately we hope our interns will be better equipped to consider a career in public policy analysis and research.
While we mostly do economic research, we are not necessarily seeking an economics student. Students should have a strong background in economics, mathematics, statistics, geography or a similar field. Internships typically last around twelve weeks over the summer months, though this is flexible. Interns work a paid 40 hour week at our Wellington office.
Last summer we had four students joining Motu as interns. We were very pleased to welcome Alex Olssen (Victoria University of Wellington), Ruth Pinkerton (Waikato University), Darian Woods (University of Canterbury) and Nicholas Tarrant (University of Otago) to work with us various research projects alongside senior fellows and research analysts.
For info from previous interns, see our Summer Intern information sheet (PDF 564 KB).
To apply for 20010/11 internships, please send your cover letter, CV and academic record to Rhylie Alexander.
Maori internship
Filled for 2010. Look out for vacancies for 2011.
In addition to our open-entry internships, funding is also available for students of Maori descent. Our research programmes include several issues of direct relevance to Maori. Interns are often involved in this work, but we are not expecting them to bring specific skills because of their Maori heritage. We are currently taking applications. Dates flexible.
Recruitment contact: Rhylie Alexander.
Intern profile
Ruth Pinkerton
Ruth Pinkerton came to Motu after completing her undergaduate management degree at the University of Waikato, majoring in economics. She is interested in public policy issues and in particular labour economics, so when the opportunity came up to work with a group of the most highly regarded research economists in New Zealand, she jumped at it.
Ruth’s research project looked at residential sorting patterns in Auckland. She worked with senior fellow Dave Maré. This gave her an opportunity to carry out a range of tasks, from literature reviews to data analysis. Ruth says she really enjoyed her time at Motu. It gave her the opportunity to learn many new things through a hands-on approach. Ruth enjoyed that at Motu you are surrounded by incredibly well connected and talented people. She found it to be a friendly and supportive environment, and an invaluable experience.
On returning to Waikato to complete her Honours year in economics, Ruth will take more papers involving econometric techniques, as her time at Motu taught her that they are very useful for this sort of research.
Read more (564KB) about some of Motu’s past interns.