Institute for Jewish Policy Research

the product until the final design is reached. This was a great real-life application of the product

development strategies, such as the Lean Start Up Cycle, that were taught in the B2 Engineering in

Society course this year. Initially, it was easy to get caught up in trying to jump towards making a fully

functioning product before establishing the groundwork. However, I quickly learnt just how important it is to produce Minimal Viable Products in order to verify functionality, before trying to make a higher-

level design.

My experience has encouraged me to work in the start-up industry, as I enjoyed the varying challenges

that are involved, from creating a Business Plan to holding meetings with practicing clinicians. I have a

particular interest in Biomedical Engineering, which has only been reaffirmed by this experience. I plan to continue to work in this field in the future, having chosen my 4th year C paper options to reflect this.

Practical Advice

I'd advise any future interns to make sure they keep a good work life balance when working from home.

Ruby Shaya Cooper, Somerville College, BA Philosophy, Politics and Economics,

Second Year Undergraduate, a mixture of in-person and remote working

Work Projects

Prior to my internship, I was invited to an in-

house training session on survey methods,

which was very useful and also allowed me to

meet the team before starting. I was primarily

working on a dataset with Charity Commission

data. Prior to me starting my internship, JPR

researchers had worked on identifying a list of key words to pick out Jewish charities, as well as

a list of words that are 'flags', and pick out charities to be manually assessed. In my first week, I

worked on cleaning the data. This included selecting random samples to manually check the

reliability of the automatic keyword selection, as well as a count check to manually check the

largest charities. I also completed a small literature review on the work that has been done so

far on the Jewish charity sector.

Aside from this, my first week included taking part in a team meeting, and doing a short

introduction for others to learning R. In my second week, I had to start by finishing preparing

the sample. This included finishing manual checks. Alongside this I prepared a list from the

literature review of possible tables, graphs, and analyses that I could do with the data. By the

middle of the week, the sample was finalised and I began to start making tables from the data. I

used pivot tables to start the process of data visualisation. Further to this, I joined a meeting

with a researcher from the Jewish Leadership Council, in which we discussed the survey that

they had done of large Jewish charities. I communicated the purpose and scope of the JPR

Project's data, and talked over the prospects for data analysis on the survey sample. In the

middle of my second week Carli, who I had been working with, offered me an opportunity to be

a JPR Research Student, which entails up to 40 days of paid work for JPR throughout the 22-23

year.

Throughout the following week, I thought about and communicated that I would love to take

up the work but would only be able to commit to 20 days before my final university exams. This

was then agreed, and included a few extra days directly following the end of my internship to

finalise parts of the project. In my third week, I began with preparing data visualisation and

analysis from the JLC survey data. I prepared a presentation for the next meeting with the JLC

researcher. I then led that 2-hour meeting in which we discussed the data we could see, and

improvements. Throughout the meeting I altered the graphs and identified data in order to

respond to requests from my colleague and the JLC researcher. The meeting went extremely

well.

Later that week I discussed with my colleague that the best way to wrap up my work (for now)

would be to create manipulatable pivot tables that could be changed in response to the table/graph that was needed. I set to work on creating those pivot tables, towards the end of