December 7-13th is Computer Science Education Week!

Recently, feminist media scholars have demanded we take seriously seriously the dearth of women and people of color in computing fields. This week presents the opportunity to broadcast professional role models to inspire young minority techies in pursuit of their STEM dreams, both in industry and in academia.

Source: Microsoft Corporate Blogs

Mary L. Gray, senior researcher at the Social Media Collective, was recently featured in Microsoft’s “17 for ’17: Microsoft researchers on what to expect in 2017 and 2027,” which sought to work against this gap by highlighting 17 women from within their global research organization.

Mary offers insights on the digital world we should anticipate over the next decade and where to position ourselves as scholars.

Just a reminder, January 1 is the deadline for applications for the summer 2017 internship program with the Social Media Collective, at Microsoft Research New England. All the information you need, about the internship, the necessary qualifications, and how to apply, can be found here. During their twelve-week stay, SMC interns devise and execute their own research project, distinct from the focus of their dissertation. The expected outcome is a draft of a publishable scholarly paper for an academic journal or conference. Our goal is to help interns advance their own careers.

The Social Media Collective (in New England, we are Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie, and Mary Gray, with current postdocs Dan Greene and Dylan Mulvin) bring together empirical and critical perspectives to understand the political and cultural dynamics that underpin social media technologies. Primary mentors for this year will be Nancy Baym and Tarleton Gillespie, with additional guidance offered by other members of SMC.

Uber has TV ads now. The one I see most often is called “Get Your Side Hustle On”. It opens with a thirty-something black male Uber driver telling us, somewhat wearily, “These days, everyone needs a side hustle.” Then the upbeat horns pick up, he and his passenger start dancing, and he tells us how Uber helps drivers move “from earning, to working, to chilling at the push of a button.” He’s earning in his car, working when he’s teaching middle-school chemistry, and chilling when he’s passed out on the couch in the middle of the day, his daughter reading beside him. The side hustle is what helps you make ends meet. Uber, now valued at around $62.5 billion, helps you get your side hustle on whenever you have spare time to slip between your full-time job, your childcare responsibilities, your social life, and your sleep schedule.

There’s some romance to this story, of course; Americans love a hustler. But all credit to Uber, because this ad seems to be an accurate representation of their business model and the reason why they, founded in 2009 and officially launched in 2011, and the rest of the gig economy have grown so rapidly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.  New data from Pew show that folks on the fringes of the formal labor market, those without secure jobs or the sort of wealth that provides a cushion in tough times, are seeking out gig economy work to make ends meet.

This a sizable group: 8% of Americans earned money from technology-enabled gig work last year. Pew calls these tools for soliciting drivers, handymen, shoppers, and data-enterers ‘labor platforms’, distinct from the ‘capital platforms’ used to rent your home or sell your bespoke wares. Another 18% of Americans made money from the latter in the last year. It is no coincidence that the growth and success of gig platforms has taken place during a period of stagnant wages and labor market bifurcation (i.e., the jobs generated in the wake of the crisis have been concentrated in high-wage knowledge sectors and low-wage service sectors, with the middle increasingly disappearing). It is precisely because so many Americans have needed to find a little work on the side that these gig platforms are thriving. These days, everyone needs a side hustle.

This is not an altogether new phenomenon. The so-called ‘informal economy’ often grows during recessions. When good jobs are hard to find, people seek out other, less-regulated means to put food on the table: selling food out of a cooler at the bus stop, taking in neighbors’ laundry, offering handyman services to other members of your church, or driving an unlicensed taxi for a few spare bucks. In previous eras, these would have been largely off-the-books, cash-only exchanges, because individual hustlers don’t want to get the health department, the taxicab commission, or the taxman involved. But the genius of Uber, TaskRabbit, and the like is that they formalize these previously informal exchanges by making them accessible to any consumer with a credit card and a smartphone, while simultaneously retaining the informality that frees the company from the obligations employers typically owe employees or regulators. And of course, gig platforms create many new opportunities for this work just by providing extensive logistical support for it, support that justifies their extraction of rent from this newly formalized work conducted on their platforms.

What was the macroeconomic soil in which these business models took root? According to the Economic Policy Institute, while US workers’ productivity has grown by leaps and bounds since 1979, their real wages have barely budged—and low-wage workers’ pay has actually fallen. The exception is the top 5% of earners, whose wages have grown 41% since 1979. So most of our wages haven’t grown in a few decades, while the cost of expensive, essential outlays like housing, healthcare, and college have soared.

More recently, the 2008 financial crash destroyed many Americans’ financial safety nets by wiping out their main sources of wealth—their investment in their homes and their retirement accounts, typically 401Ks—and put serious strain on other savings and investments, if they had them. There has always been a massive wealth gap between white Americans and people of color, which severely restricts the social mobility of the latter, since inherited wealth is a crucial ingredient in affording big things like housing and college and smaller things like unpaid internships This gap widened a great deal in the wake of the housing crash, with black and Latino households losing three and four times more wealth respectively than white households between 2007 and 2010. And while the unemployment rate has finally fallen back to pre-recession levels, the jobs that we have regained since the recession have not been good ones. The National Employment Law Project found that while employment losses during the recession were concentrated in mid-wage and higher-wage industries, the employment gains during the recovery have been concentrated in low-wage industries.  We’ve had an uneven recovery, especially for people of color.

How does Pew’s new data on gig economy workers fit into these trends? Well, the data only provide a snapshot. To confirm my speculation that gig platforms capture precarious Americans’ informal work and extend the opportunity for a side hustle to others, we’d need to know more about trends in gig economy work across time and geography (e.g., whether tighter local labor markets discouraged gig work or not), and what sort of other work gig workers are doing. But this snapshot seems to support my suspicions:

• 56% of labor platform users say the money they earn through those platforms is either ‘essential’ or ‘important’ to meeting their basic needs, as opposed to being ‘nice to have’ (42%). They’re more likely to have a household income below $30,000 (57%), be nonwhite (64%), and lack a college degree (52%).
• Recalling our black male middle-school teacher going from chilling to working at the push of a button, labor platform users for whom those earnings are essential or important are more likely to say they use the platform because it gives them control over their own schedule (45%) and because there are few jobs in their area (25%). Those who say the money is nice to have are more often (62%) motivated by the work being fun, or just something to do.
• 14% of black Americans and 11% of Latinos earned money from online gig work in the past year, compared to 5% of whites. Black Americans are more likely to have done physical gigs like driving or taking in laundry (5%) than white Americans (1%)
• Fewer than half (44%) of technology-enabled gig workers are employed full-time. 32% are unemployed.
• Americans making less than $30,000 per year are more than twice as likely (10%) to do gig work than Americans making more than $75,000 per year (4%).
• Compared to Americans overall, technology-enabled gig workers are less likely to have health insurance (10% lower than the national average), a credit card (15% lower), or a retirement account (13% lower).

Importantly, Pew finds large differences between labor and capital platforms; users of the latter are older, whiter, wealthier, more highly educated, and less reliant on these earnings than gig workers. Who, then, is most likely to be a gig worker who needs that side hustle? A working-class person of color without a college degree who is fitting that hustle in between other life tasks because they’re making less than $30,000 a year, lack a financial safety net, and struggle to afford healthcare. So, that Uber ad wasn’t 100% correct: Some people need a side hustle more than others these days.

The language of the ‘sharing economy’ positions all of us equally in the same community of app users. Indeed, the main advocacy group for the industry, now packaging portable benefits for gig workers, is simply called Peers. But if we read the latest data alongside earlier data on consumers of gig platform labor, it becomes clear that we are not all on the same page. An earlier Pew report found that super-users who purchase services from six or more of these platforms are generally digitally literate, college-educated urbanites making $75,000 or more. The gulf between frequent suppliers of labor to these platforms and frequent purchasers of that labor mirrors the gulf in the labor market that has been growing for decades but which ballooned after the recession: Low-wage service jobs with unpredictable schedules and no benefits on one side, and high-wage knowledge economy jobs concentrated in urban areas on the other.

That so many are desperate to supply their labor for these platforms must surely be a major factor in their growth. They were the right model for the right moment. With good jobs drying up and people looking for extra, flexible, informal work, these digital platforms were ready to welcome them. In precarious times, the side hustle is a growth industry.

Dan is a postdoctoral researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England.  He studies the institutions and technologies that teach us how, where, and why to work in the information economy. You can learn more about him and his research at dmgreene.net.

This post was spurred by an email from Tarleton Gillespie and Hector Postigo to contribute to a collected series that appeared on Culture Digitally today. The focus of that series is for scholars to “think hard about our own work and research agendas, and how they should shift to face new political realities.”

—

I didn’t have a chance to contribute to this collection yesterday because I was trying to figure out how to prepare a lecture on the networked press to a class of undergraduates I’d never met before.  Months ago, I agreed to give a guest lecture in Henry Jenkins’s Communication & Technology class and it never occurred to me that November 9^th would be such an ominous day.

I hadn’t slept the previous night as I tried to quell a dizzying headache and nausea, thinking about what I could possibly say to students about how a field I’m supposedly an expert in got everything so wrong.  I spent the morning avoiding news coverage, deeply angry at an institution I’m supposed to be invested in.  Instead, I played with different lecture openings, looked at old slides, arranged and rearranged arguments I’ve made countless times before. I thought that I’d just rely on a PowerPoint deck I knew well, get through the 90 minutes, and return to my fog.

Time eventually ran out, I bundled up my preparation as it was, and made my way to campus.

I walked into the room still unclear about what I’d say.  I didn’t know these students (I was the guest lecturer) and, after seeing several “Make America Great Again” t-shirts on campus the previous day, I wasn’t sure what they’d be feeling.  I mentally prepared myself for everything from tears (theirs and mine) to being drawn into an encounter with celebrating Trump supporters.

I began class. I asked them to put away their laptops and had the lingerers in the back come up to fill out the front row seats.

I started honestly: I told them that I didn’t really know how to begin, that I’d never led a class like this on a day like this, and that I wasn’t even sure this was where I wanted to be right now.  Their smiles, nods, and knowing glances at each other put me at ease.

I asked them why they studied Communication.  I told them why I did.  I told them that our jobs as Communication scholars was to figure out why people act together, build meaning, and share consequences.  And I told them that there was never a more important time for us to be world-class at what we did.  I told them that we can’t make the mistake fish make: they don’t know what water is because they’re always swimming in it.  We can’t not think critically about media because it’s all around us and we think we have little power to shape it.

I asked them to take out a piece of paper and free-form write for 7 minutes on two questions: what do you want from online news? And what do we need from online news?  They wrote and I stared out the window.

When the time was up we talked about similarities among their individual desires, where they thought those desires came from, how hard it was to define a “we”, and whose responsibility it was to differentiate a want from a need.  All of their comments were peppered with stories from the previous night: how confused they were about what was happening, how unexpected everything was, how disconnected they’d felt from pro-Trump parts of the country.  It was exhausting, they said, to have to individually create media worlds that challenged what their instincts made them want.  They didn’t know what a public might need from the news.  They assumed that the news media knew.  And they talked about “objectivity” and “balance” and “neutrality” in all the ways students usually do when they first start thinking about journalism.

I then went old-school.  We talked about James Carey’s transmission versus ritual models of communication. I channeled my advisor Ted Glasser to argue that the press exists in traditions not nature (news is never found, it is always made).  We looked at the history of the AP Style Guide to see the contingency of language: e.g., how it took the New York Times a long time to call women anything other than “Miss” or “Mrs.” (“why were woman ever defined by their marital status?” one female student said) and why the Times called gay men “longtime companions” instead of lovers or partners in AIDS plague obituaries.  We talked about the difference between writing “illegal” versus “undocumented” immigrant.  We talked about why the AP captioned an image a young person of colour wading through chest-high water carrying food as a “looter” versus why the Agence-France Presse said two white people in a similar photo were “finding” bread.  We talked about gender, and orientation, and race and I claimed victory when one student said “it seems like objectivity is just a construct.” Yes, yes, yes.

We then looked at Pew stats on social media and the news.  We looked at data, asked questions about where it came from and what it meant, and tried to write headlines for stories that might be written about the findings.  One student said she was “angry” at her Facebook algorithm for keeping from her news about the rest of the country; she’d assumed that her feed of Hillary supporters was similar to everyone else’s.  She didn’t understand why a friend in Georgia texted her to say she was nervous about Trump winning because Hillary’s impending win was “all over social media”.

One student asked when news organizations began endorsing candidates and whether such endorsements mean anything anymore.  We looked at Pew’s stats about how Republicans, Democrats, and Independents use social media differently, questioned their significance, and started asking questions about the people who weren’t showing up in social media statistics.  For me, the best conversation came just as class was about to end.  I asked “if many people are getting their news from social media, why don’t platforms endorse candidates?” and one student replied “because they think they’re being neutral and objective, just like the press thought it was.”

I know there are ongoing debates about the empirical bases for filter bubbles and how it’s incredibly hard—and dangerous—to track media circulation using media effects methodologies.  That wasn’t the point of our discussion.  It was to be fish who noticed and thought about the water.  It was to ask new and uncomfortable questions about platforms and news.  It was to demand different kinds of data.  It was to challenge the wisdom and sincerity of tech leaders who say they’re running technology companies, not media companies.  It was to refuse to accept that media systems are only the responsibility of individuals tasked with figuring out the differences between what individuals want and publics need.  It was to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past: eras not when “we” thought it was okay to run sexist, homophobic, racist media systems but when those with the power to make such systems thought such failures were acceptable artifacts of chasing the myth of objectivity.

I’ll be honest that teaching hasn’t always been the favourite part of my job. I do it, I’m not terrible at it, I sometimes admire and learn from some of my students, and every now and then I get a high from a class well taught or a student who “gets it” and helps us both see the world differently.  But yesterday’s class reminded me of what it sometimes felt like to go to church.  Teaching felt like a form of communion: a way not only to transmit information but critically, reflectively, constructively figure out what it means to live together.  This is the spirit of the media systems we need now more than ever, that I’m re-energized to help build through teaching and scholarship.

The 17th annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers is being held this week (Oct 5-8) in Berlin, Germany. It is a thrill to see so many past and present SMC members presenting their latest work, especially with Kate Crawford as part of the conference’s plenary panel Thursday evening. Below is a cheat sheet of all the SMC presentations, in case you want to follow along. (If we forgot somebody, please email us and we’ll add you!)

Wednesday, October 5th, 2016

Thursday, October 6th, 2016

Friday, October 7th, 2016

Saturday, October 8th, 2016

Germaine Halegoua (University of Kansas), Alex Leavitt (Facebook), and Mary L. Gray recently published an article based on research conducted while Germaine was a Ph.D. Intern and Alex was a Research Assistant at MSR.

The article, “Jumping For Fun?: Negotiating Mobility and the Geopolitics of Foursquare” was published in Social Media + Society and is available here: http://sms.sagepub.com/content/2/3/2056305116665859.full.pdf+html.

Abstract: Rather than assume that there is some universal “right way” to engage social media platforms, we interrogate how the location-based social media practice known as “jumping” played out on the popular service Foursquare. We use this case to investigate how a “global” or universal system is constructed with an imagined user in mind, one who enjoys a particular type of mobility and experience of place. We argue that the practices of “Indonesian” Foursquare jumpers and the discourses surrounding their use of Foursquare illustrate that practices understood as transgressive or resistive might best be read as strategies for engaging with a platform as groups contend with marginalizing social, economic, and/or political conditions.

Citation: Halegoua, Germaine R., Alex Leavitt, and Mary L. Gray. “Jumping for Fun? Negotiating Mobility and the Geopolitics of Foursquare.” Social Media + Society 2, no. 3 (July 1, 2016): 2056305116665859. doi:10.1177/2056305116665859.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: JANUARY 1, 2017

Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for advanced PhD students to join the Social Media Collective (SMC) for its 12-week Internship program. The Social Media Collective (in New England, we are Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie, and Mary Gray, with current postdocs Dan Greene and Dylan Mulvin) bring together empirical and critical perspectives to understand the political and cultural dynamics that underpin social media technologies. Learn more about us here.

MSRNE internships are 12-week paid stays in our lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During their stay, SMC interns are expected to devise and execute their own research project, distinct from the focus of their dissertation (see the project requirements below). The expected outcome is a draft of a publishable scholarly paper for an academic journal or conference of the intern’s choosing. Our goal is to help the intern advance their own career; interns are strongly encouraged to work towards a creative outcome that will help them on the academic job market.

The ideal candidate may be trained in any number of disciplines (including anthropology, communication, information studies, media studies, sociology, science and technology studies, or a related field), but should have a strong social scientific or humanistic methodological, analytical, and theoretical foundation, be interested in questions related to media or communication technologies and society or culture, and be interested in working in a highly interdisciplinary environment that includes computer scientists, mathematicians, and economists.

Primary mentors for this year will be Nancy Baym and Tarleton Gillespie, with additional guidance offered by other members of SMC. We are looking for applicants working in one or more of the following areas:

• Personal relationships and digital media
• Audiences and the shifting landscapes of producer/consumer relations
• Affective, immaterial, and other frameworks for understanding digital labor
• How platforms, through their design and policies, shape public discourse
• The politics of algorithms, metrics, and big data for a computational culture
• The interactional dynamics, cultural understanding, or public impact of AI chatbots or intelligent agents

Interns are also expected to give short presentations on their project, contribute to the SMC blog, attend the weekly lab colloquia, and contribute to the life of the community through weekly lunches with fellow PhD interns and the broader lab community. There are also natural opportunities for collaboration with SMC researchers and visitors, and with others currently working at MSRNE, including computer scientists, economists, and mathematicians. PhD interns are expected to be on-site for the duration of their internship.

Applicants must have advanced to candidacy in their PhD program by the time they start their internship. (Unfortunately, there are no opportunities for Master’s students or early PhD students at this time). Applicants from historically marginalized communities, underrepresented in higher education, and students from universities outside of the United States are encouraged to apply.

PEOPLE AT MSRNE SOCIAL MEDIA COLLECTIVE

The Social Media Collective is comprised of full-time researchers, postdocs, visiting faculty, Ph.D. interns, and research assistants. Current projects in New England include:

• How does the use of social media affect relationships between artists and audiences in creative industries, and what does that tell us about the future of work? (Nancy Baym)
• How are social media platforms, through their algorithmic design and user policies, taking up the role of intermediaries for public discourse? (Tarleton Gillespie)
• What are the cultural, political, and economic implications of crowdsourcing as a new form of semi-automated, globally-distributed digital labor? (Mary L. Gray)
• How do public institutions like schools and libraries prepare workers for the information economy, and how are they changed in the process? (Dan Greene)
• How are media standards made, and what do their histories tell us about the kinds of things we can represent? (Dylan Mulvin)

SMC PhD interns may also have the opportunity to connect with our sister Social Media Collective members in New York City. Related projects in New York City include:

• What are the politics, ethics, and policy implications of artificial intelligence and data science? (Kate Crawford, MSR-NYC)
• What are the social and cultural issues arising from data-centric technological development? (danah boyd, Data & Society Research Institute)

For more information about the Social Media Collective, and a list of past interns, visit the About page of our blog. For a complete list of all permanent researchers and current postdocs based at the New England lab, see: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/newengland/people/bios.aspx

APPLICATION PROCESS

To apply for a PhD internship with the Social Media Collective, fill out the online application form: https://careers.research.microsoft.com/

On the application website, please indicate that your research area of interest is “Anthropology, Communication, Media Studies, and Sociology” and that your location preference is “New England, MA, U.S.” in the pull down menus. Also enter the name of a mentor (Nancy Baym or Tarleton Gillespie) whose work most directly relates to your own in the “Microsoft Research Contact” field. IF YOU DO NOT MARK THESE PREFERENCES WE WILL NOT RECEIVE YOUR APPLICATION. So, please, make sure to follow these detailed instructions.

Your application needs to include:

1. A short description (no more than 2 pages, single spaced) of 1 or 2 projects that you propose to do while interning at MSRNE, independently and/or in collaboration with current SMC researchers. The project proposals can be related to, but must be distinct from your dissertation research. Be specific and tell us:
   • What is the research question animating your proposed project?
   • What methods would you use to address your question?
   • How does your research question speak to the interests of the SMC?
   • Who do you hope to reach (who are you engaging) with this proposed research?
2. A brief description of your dissertation project.
3. An academic article-length manuscript (~7,000 or more) that you have authored or co-authored (published or unpublished) that demonstrates your writing skills.
4. A copy of your CV.
5. The names and contact information for 3 references (one must be your dissertation advisor).
6. A pointer to your website or other online presence (if available; this is not required).

A request for letters will be sent directly to your list of referees, on your behalf. IMPORTANT: THE APPLICATION SYSTEM WILL NOT REQUEST THOSE REFERENCE LETTERS UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE SUBMITTED YOUR APPLICATION! Please warn your letter writers in advance so that they will be ready to submit them when they receive the prompt. The email they receive will automatically tell them they have two weeks to respond. Please ensure that they expect this email (tell them to check their spam folders, too!) and are prepared to submit your letter by our application deadline.  You can check the progress on individual reference requests at any time by clicking the status tab within your application page. Note that a complete application must include three submitted letters of reference.

If you have any questions about the application process, please contact Tarleton Gillespie at tarleton@microsoft.com and include “SMC PhD Internship” in the subject line.

TIMELINE

Due to the volume of applications, late submissions (including submissions with late letters of reference) will not be considered. We will not be able to provide specific feedback on individual applications. Finalists will be contacted in January to arrange a Skype interview. Applicants chosen for the internship will be informed in February and announced on the socialmediacollective.org blog.

PREVIOUS INTERN TESTIMONIALS

“The internship at Microsoft Research was all of the things I wanted it to be – personally productive, intellectually rich, quiet enough to focus, noisy enough to avoid complete hermit-like cave dwelling behavior, and full of opportunities to begin ongoing professional relationships with other scholars who I might not have run into elsewhere.”
— Laura Noren, Sociology, New York University

“If I could design my own graduate school experience, it would feel a lot like my summer at Microsoft Research. I had the chance to undertake a project that I’d wanted to do for a long time, surrounded by really supportive and engaging thinkers who could provide guidance on things to read and concepts to consider, but who could also provoke interesting questions on the ethics of ethnographic work or the complexities of building an identity as a social sciences researcher. Overall, it was a terrific experience for me as a researcher as well as a thinker.”
— Jessica Lingel, Library and Information Science, Rutgers University

“My internship experience at MSRNE was eye-opening, mind-expanding and happy-making. If you are looking to level up as a scholar – reach new depth in your focus area, while broadening your scope in directions you would never dream up on your own; and you’d like to do that with the brightest, most inspiring and supportive group of scholars and humans – then you definitely want to apply.”
— Kat Tiidenberg, Sociology, Tallinn University, Estonia

“The Microsoft Internship is a life-changing experience. The program offers structure and space for emerging scholars to find their own voice while also engaging in interdisciplinary conversations. For social scientists especially the exposure to various forms of thinking, measuring, and problem-solving is unparalleled. I continue to call on the relationships I made at MSRE and always make space to talk to a former or current intern. Those kinds of relationships have a long tail.”
— Tressie McMillan Cottom, Sociology, Emory University

“My summer at MSR New England has been an important part of my development as a researcher. Coming right after the exhausting, enriching ordeal of general/qualifying exams, it was exactly what I needed to step back, plunge my hands into a research project, and set the stage for my dissertation… PhD interns are given substantial intellectual freedom to pursue the questions they care about. As a consequence, the onus is mostly on the intern to develop their research project, justify it to their mentors, and do the work. While my mentors asked me good, supportive, and often helpfully hard, critical questions, but my relationship with them was not the relationship of an RA to a PI– instead it was the relationship of a junior colleague to senior ones.”
— J. Nathan Matias, Media Lab, MIT (read more here)

“This internship provided me with the opportunity to challenge myself beyond what I thought was possible within three months. With the SMC’s guidance, support, and encouragement, I was able to reflect deeply about my work while also exploring broader research possibilities by learning about the SMC’s diverse projects and exchanging ideas with visiting scholars. This experience will shape my research career and, indeed, my life for years to come.”
— Stefanie Duguay, Communication, Queensland University of Technology

“There are four main reasons why I consider the summer I spent as an intern with the Social Media Collective to be a formative experience in my career. 1. was the opportunity to work one-on-one with the senior scholars on my own project, and the chance to see “behind the scenes” on how they approach their own work. 2. The environment created by the SMC is one of openness and kindness, where scholars encourage and help each other do their best work. 3. hearing from the interdisciplinary members of the larger MSR community, and presenting work to them, required learning how to engage people in other fields. And finally, 4. the lasting effect: Between senior scholars and fellow interns, you become a part of a community of researchers and create friendships that extend well beyond the period of your internship.”
— Stacy Blasiola, Communication, University of Illinois Chicago

“My internship with Microsoft Research was a crash course in what a thriving academic career looks like. The weekly meetings with the research group provided structure and accountability, the stream of interdisciplinary lectures sparked intellectual stimulation, and the social activities built community. I forged relationships with peers and mentors that I would never have met in my graduate training.”
— Kate Zyskowski, Anthropology, University of Washington

“It has been an extraordinary experience for me to be an intern at Social Media Collective. Coming from a computer science background, communicating and collaborating with so many renowned social science and media scholars teaches me, as a researcher and designer of socio-technical systems, to always think of these systems in their cultural, political and economic context and consider the ethical and policy challenges they raise. Being surrounded by these smart, open and insightful people who are always willing to discuss with me when I met problems in the project, provide unique perspectives to think through the problems and share the excitements when I got promising results is simply fascinating. And being able to conduct a mixed-method research that combines qualitative insights with quantitative methodology makes the internship just the kind of research experience that I have dreamed for.”
— Ming Yin, Computer Science, Harvard University

“Spending the summer as an intern at MSR was an extremely rewarding learning experience. Having the opportunity to develop and work on your own projects as well as collaborate and workshop ideas with prestigious and extremely talented researchers was invaluable. It was amazing how all of the members of the Social Media Collective came together to create this motivating environment that was open, supportive, and collaborative. Being able to observe how renowned researchers streamline ideas, develop projects, conduct research, and manage the writing process was a uniquely helpful experience – and not only being able to observe and ask questions, but to contribute to some of these stages was amazing and unexpected.”
— Germaine Halegoua, Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Not only was I able to work with so many smart people, but the thoughtfulness and care they took when they engaged with my research can’t be stressed enough. The ability to truly listen to someone is so important. You have these researchers doing multiple, fascinating projects, but they still make time to help out interns in whatever way they can. I always felt I had everyone’s attention when I spoke about my project or other issues I had, and everyone was always willing to discuss any questions I had, or even if I just wanted clarification on a comment someone had made at an earlier point. Another favorite aspect of mine was learning about other interns’ projects and connecting with people outside my discipline.”
–Jolie Matthews, Education, Stanford University

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How much is the salary/stipend? How is it disbursed?
The exact amount changes year to year and depends on a student’s degree status and any past internships with MSR, but it’s somewhere above $2,000/month (after taxes). Interns are paid every 2 weeks. Be aware that the first paycheck doesn’t arrive until about week 3 or 4 (takes awhile for the paperwork to process) so you’d need to make sure you have resources to cover you transition to Cambridge, MA.
Is housing included? Is there assistance finding housing?
The internship comes with funds for travel to/from the area, a small relocation budget, and either a housing stipend or assigned housing.
Are other living expenses included, such as healthcare?
Commuting is covered through either a voucher to get a bike, parking at the building, or a commuter pass. Healthcare is *not* provided, though there is a (pricey) policy that students can purchase while here. The assumption is that interns are covered by their home institution’s healthcare policies, as you would be if you are on summer break.
Are there any provisions for dependents traveling with the intern?
There are, but they can change, so feel free to ask about the specifics that pertain to you. Dependents can be covered with housing (i.e. interns with families receive housing assignments that accommodate their children and partners). Interns with families have definitely been able to make the visit work.
Please note: This internship is *intense* – even for the pretty good pay and the sweet view, it’s not worth applying for this unless you’re ready to work as hard (or harder) than you have in any grad seminar before.