Ravi Venugopal

Describe the day-to-day responsibilities you had during your internship.  

I worked in the London office twice a week and the rest from home. My day was generally split between meetings with project managers, check-ins with my line manager and independent work on deliverables. Its been great to work both at home and in the office, getting to know my colleagues and meet the wider team. 

What project(s) were you involved in? What outcomes or deliverables were generated?  

I was involved in around 15 ongoing projects in different capacities. In some cases I led data cleaning and analysis, and produced plots and statistical outputs that would go into reports. In some cases I helped in the design of projects and had input into methodology. I also supported colleagues onboarding new partners and researched   networking events for sharing the research ImpactEd conducted.

The workload was really varied; my manager built an interactive dashboard that’s helped me track my tasks and get involved in other projects. The wider team could suggest things for me to work on through the dashboard, which made it easy to plan my time and dive into areas I was interested in.

What software and data analysis techniques did you have the opportunity to use?  

I mainly used Excel for data cleaning, preliminary analysis, and creating visualizations, while leveraging R for more sophisticated statistical analysis, data modelling, and generating detailed reports

Were you able to apply any skills or knowledge from your academic studies to your internship work?  

This work is quite similar to the Q step modules at UCL in that we take data, clean and analyse it, and produce output and a report. This is similar to some of the assessments I had in POLS0010.

What was it like working for your provider? 

It has been great! ImpactEd has a really nice and welcoming team, who were glad to have an extra pair of hands with the quantitative skills I brought to the table. My manager was always on hand to ask questions, and I had regular catch-ups every week to ensure I was on track or could raise any queries I had. 

How would you describe the overall impact of this internship on your personal or professional development?  

It was positive in learning about how real research and impact evaluation is conducted, and learning about the considerations taken into account when dealing with real clients, deadlines and collaborating with a team on a single project.

What advice or guidance would you give to future students considering applying for the internship scheme? 

Apply to ImpactEd if you have an interest in working with education policy and projects. If you have strong quant skills you will be greatly valued, although they also have many opportunities for qual work.