Internships Summer 2020: Closing thoughts and final presentations recording

Last week was the end of the Outreachy May 2020 Internship Round, where we held a final presentations call for our interns, mentors and community. Due to the wide range of time zones, from New York to Singapore, no one time was optimal for everyone, so we extend our sincere gratitude that all the students were willing to attend the call!

We are thankful to a Wellcome Trust Diversity and Inclusion Grant for funding three of our interns, Outreachy for matching this by funding two interns, and our main Wellcome grant for making it possible to fund two more. This brings us up to a count of seven interns, the highest number that we’ve had the pleasure of working with yet at one time! This wouldn’t have been possible without help from our external mentors — Akshat Bhargava, Aman Dwivedi, Ankur Kumar, Asher Pasha and Nikhil Vats — whom will all be receiving a small prize as a token of our gratitude.

During the internship period, we had to say goodbye to our valued InterMine team member for 5 years, Yo Yehudi, who drove our internship scheme to its current state and has left to become the Technical Lead for Open Source at the Wellcome Trust. Thanks to the efforts of our mentors for their support of our interns, and to Rachel for running the final presentation call, we were able to provide a closing to the internship period we can all be proud of.

A recording of the final presentation call is available on our YouTube channel and embedded below.

Additional information on our interns

Many of our interns have been writing blog posts throughout their internship, which you may find an enjoyable read:

The GitHub accounts of all our interns are listed below, if you wish to check out their contributions:

In closing

It’s been a joy to work with so many talented people, and this includes all the contributions during the Outreachy contribution period prior to intern selection. Many valuable contributions to InterMine projects were made during this period, and we regret we weren’t able to offer everyone an internship.

We hope the next year of internships will be as successful as this one, and look forward to coming up with more exciting internship projects, as well as working with more fantastic interns and mentors. Until then, let’s enjoy the fruits of this labour!