Forum:Are there undergraduate bioinformatic internships in the area of marine biology?

Question

[tchnl]

Hello everyone,

Currently I'm in my 4th year of the bachelor bioinformatics at the HAN university of applied sciences, Netherlands. I'm looking for a foreign internship starting this summer. I'm happy to see the large supply of internships on the internet and currently reading through them 1 by 1.

Meanwhile, I'd like to ask if any of you might know if there are any bioinformatic internships in the field of marine biology (as I personally have an affinity with marine biology)?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

[Aerval]

Hi tchnl,

This depends on the type of internship you are looking for.

Paid internships are very hard to find, except maybe for internships covered by exchange organisations like Fulbright in the US or GAES/DAAD in Germany. Anyways, I think it is almost impossible to get these now for this summer as you have to plan them more in advance. I am not sure whether you could get an Erasmus stipend for an internship but this also needs some preparation time before.

If you can do an unpaid internship, it is quite easy just to get that as you are of (almost) no cost for any group then. You then can just write to group leaders with topics you are interested in or try to get in contact with PhD students in that area. For example, I am just doing an Internship where I met a PhD student at a Bioinformatics Unseminar and asked him what he does...

A third option are obviously summer schools (and camps) which you can find (for the EU) on various websites. Some of them are actually quiet cheap or even free and allow for a very similar experiences like an internship.

I hope that helps a bit (though it is not about marine biology)

Answer 2

[Michael]

We have offered a summer internship at the Sea Lice Research Centre jointly with the Department of Informatics in Bergen, last summer, and it worked nicely. At the SLRC we are investigating the salmon louse, a salmon parasite with major impact on global aquaculture. We have the genome sequence and a lot of NGS data available

I am planning to offer one summer internship in 2015 as well. The topic can be negotiated but it could be related to LiceBase, a model organism database of sea lice and other emerging genomes, based on GMOD. Hope this is marine enough in focus for you. Please have a look at our annual report, to see what the centre is doing.