Careers at RFCUNYJob Openings

CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG): About Us 

The CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance has a mission to improve the financing, delivery, and measurement of critical public services through research, technical assistance, and education. We lead projects aimed at reforming the criminal justice system, measuring urban inequality, expanding the reach of social service providers, and more. Each project has a dedicated team of research and policy experts who collaborate closely with internal and external organizations. For more information about ISLG, please visit www.islg.cuny.edu. 

Our Goals for Diversity and Inclusion 

We strive to foster an office environment and an approach to work that welcomes and respects different perspectives, backgrounds, and life experiences. We are working towards our goal of recruiting and retaining staff, interns and advisory group members who are diverse in terms of race, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, veteran status, socioeconomic status, disability, and justice system involvement. 

Who we are looking for

ISLG is recruiting up to two (2) CUNY undergraduate and/or graduate student data science interns to support the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), an initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. ISLG serves as the primary data and research partner for the SJC. Among ISLG’s responsibilities is providing data, measurement, and analytic support to participating cities and counties across the country. This support includes the collection, cleaning, validation, and management of administrative case-level data collected from across each city and county’s criminal legal system, and contributes to the broader research and evaluation agenda of the Challenge.

The interns will help develop a comprehensive data tree, utilizing data science techniques and approaches to identify and map data across SJC jurisdictions’ criminal legal data systems. Interns will work closely with core data and research staff to translate practical data analysis needs and supports into programming work – this may include 1) developing syntax to process, validate, and standardize administrative data files and 2) conducting quantitative analysis (descriptive statistics, etc.) across administrative data files.

The core of this internship is creating community and peer-to-peer learning among ISLG interns across Institute departments; to foster community we will have bi-weekly, in-person convenings that will cover a range of topics such as relationship building, project management, etc.

We are hiring interns to work at ISLG for 10 weeks during the summer months. Interns will have a hybrid work schedule and report to a designated ISLG staff member. Interns will work on a range of tasks within the project(s) listed above as well as others not listed here. Tasks that the interns may be responsible for include:

• Apply data science principles to identify, connect and standardize data across data systems and system points;
• Conduct data diagnostics for review by senior data staff members;
• Document data management decisions and technical work;
• Assist in the development of a comprehensive data tree for mapping data across various data systems;
• Write syntax to process, validate and standardize case-level administrative data files for analysis;
• Create supporting data visualizations to communicate analytical findings;
• Other tasks as needed to support ISLG’s work.