Monthly Archives: April 2013

Gain hands-on experience in the most popular topics of development impact research
Conduct meta-analysis research and gain statistics experience
Make a tangible difference in the international development community

AidGrade is offering a summer internship opportunity for undergraduates interested in development and aid effectiveness. Join our dynamic research team!

As an AidGrade intern, you will not only gain research experience but also have many other avenues for growth – managing volunteer researchers, organizing events, and making connections with other international development academic research groups. Have other skills such as web design or social media? Working with a start-up will give you the freedom and responsibility to take on self-initiated projects!

Duration: Summer, with a minimum commitment of 4 weeks. Part-time positions available.
Qualifications: Undergraduate with strong interest in international development. Statistical or meta-analysis background preferred, but not required.
Responsibilities: The intern will be responsible for sifting through impact evaluations of development programs and collecting data from them. Responsibilities will grow with the intern and training will be provided. Work can be done remotely, but there is a preference for candidates willing to work in the Washington, DC office. The ideal candidate has a good understanding of or a strong passion for international development and standard economic methods of causal attribution.
Deadline: Monday, May 20, 2013. Please submit a resume to Timothy Catlett. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis and early application is encouraged.

Contact Christine Shen to learn more! Other volunteer opportunities may be available to those with different qualifications.

COMMENTS FROM FORMER VOLUNTEERS

“I have learned a great deal about both the subjects I researched and the process of reviewing and analyzing the studies… invaluable!”

“I feel I have been given ownership over my work and am excited about seeing it be used!”

We only put up a demo version of our data tools earlier so as to get feedback before committing to larger changes.

There are some issues we want to address in the next iteration of our site:

1) We want to emphasize the context-dependence of results. The “compare programs” and “examine a program” links under the “donors” tab misleads people into thinking there is one true effect that a program is likely to have when they can access results that might be more applicable to their situation by using the “build your own meta-analysis” tool under the “meta-analysis” tab. Are there better ways of emphasizing this, apart from the warnings on the aforementioned pages?

2) We want people to be able to see the actual papers that the results are coming from more easily, especially for the meta-analysis app.

3) We would like your feedback as to what characteristics you would like to be able to filter on in the meta-analysis app (e.g. randomized, in a certain geographic area, etc.). As described there, we can’t show all the study characteristics, or the list of choices for users to make would be too long and unwieldy. To help enable better selection of characteristics for inclusion in the app, we will also look at the data to see which factors seem particularly correlated with the results of an intervention.

There are undoubtedly other things that also need improvement.

Do you have an idea as to how we can address these or other issues? Please let us know. We might be able to implement your design!