Digital Team looking for students for 2017 summer fellowship
We want curious, thoughtful, and entrepreneurial students with a passion for doing impactful work.
The Digital Team Summer Fellowship is an opportunity to work closely with City leadership and members of the Digital Team. You'll work to improve how the Boston community interacts with government, from getting a marriage certificate to reporting a pothole. Our fellows will play a vital role in:
- developing special projects
- piloting different technologies
- developing new tools, and
- testing innovative approaches to solving problems.
Opportunities
The majority of Boston residents do not follow us on twitter or attend community meetings. We’re looking for someone to help architect and execute campaigns for engaging these audiences via traditional channels, including:
- blogs and social content
- targeted email communication, and
- other non-traditional channels.
In this role, you’ll work closely with our Digital Engagement Strategist.
Moving offline services online is tough. We need to balance the needs of customers, internal stakeholders, and technology requirements. We need someone to help look at these processes, map user journeys, get stakeholders on board, and ultimately help build modern, easy-to-use applications. If the terms “process improvement”, “Six Sigma”, or “service delivery design” excite you, then you’re just the person we’re looking for. In this role, you’ll work closely with our Digital Services product manager.
We serve all the residents and visitors of Boston, including the visually impaired, those who rarely use the internet, people who don’t speak English...everyone. Catering to such a wide audience is tough. We’re looking for a fellow to help us better understand our users and how we can serve them better. You’ll build a research plan, create hypotheses, test and analyze them, use data to propose specific changes to the website, and then measure the results. In this role, you’ll work closely with our Boston.gov product manager.
We’re looking for a web developer to join us in building modern, easy-to-use web apps that get used by millions of people each year. That may involve overhauling existing apps (like this one or this one) or building entirely new services. In this role, you’ll work closely with our lead developer and our Digital Services product manager.
We constantly need high-quality media — like videos and photos — to incorporate into our work and better engage the public. We’re looking for fellows with specific design or media interests to work alongside our lead designer.
We will consider applicants for the role that best fits their experience and interests. In all of these roles, you will apply and develop your skills while working on high-impact, high-visibility projects.
How to apply
Applicants should be curious, entrepreneurial, and humble. We want strong communicators who are excellent relationship builders.
We’re also looking for fellows who are excited to get in the weeds. You’ll tackle difficult problems, learn new skills, and embrace complex and dynamic challenges. You should be able to easily juggle multiple projects, and thrive working in an open and collaborative environment.
Email your cover letter and resume to digital@boston.gov with “2017 Summer Fellowship” in the subject line. If you have a specific project you’d like to tackle, let us know.
Need to know- This internship is open to both undergraduate and graduate students in any major. However, we prefer applicants with relevant experience or education.
- You must be a US citizen to apply.
- We offer pay for a limited number of fellowships.
- We also encourage applicants with university or grant funding to apply. (Please note in your cover letter if you expect to have external funding.)
- The deadline to apply for a fellowship is February 24, 2017.
- This is an eight-week internship, with an expected start date of Monday, June 12, 2017. This date is subject to change, but we will confirm the start date with applicants when we offer them a fellowship.
- We will hold phone interviews with prospective applicant starting in early March. Our team will interview finalists in person at City Hall in mid-to-late March.
- We plan to let applicants know they've been picked by the end of March.