Discovery Internship Program
Public page for the WEHI RCP Discovery Internship Program
Why apply for the RCP Discovery Internship Program?
We assist students and early career professionals in transitioning to the real workforce by engaging them in multi-disciplinary teams on complex projects. Over the past four years, we have successfully assembled more than 70 multi-disciplinary teams.
We prepare students for the real-world by teaching them:
- communication is 90% of the work - even in tech,
- organisation skills are extremely important,
- asking questions is a key factor in how fast you learn,
- how understanding the domain problem and the users is more important than technical skills, and how to work on a complex, ambiguous project,
- showing them how to become as independent as possible,
- show them how to document and share knowledge to others in a professional manner,
- explain how a software maturity model can help clarify expectations, and
- teaching them how to work productively in a remote environment.
We even tell students how to try to avoid the top 5 mistakes that students make.
In our Welcome Session, we talk about ways you can better learn real world skills.
We have won a WEHI award - the Kellaway Excellence Education Award in 2024 - for being innovative and putting interns first. This is why we have:
- daily standups twice a day except for Friday (only once on Fridays),
- individual learning plans to help you plan your learning needs to fit your goals,
- technical diaries to share your technical work with your team mates, and
- the ability to test and improve your continuous improvement skills
Hear from previous students
You can listen to two students talk about their projects (click image below).
Open source contributors
Sometimes, we are in contact with students who cannot get course credit and are extremely keen to volunteer as an open source software contributor. In these situations, we have to be careful we do not act in an exploitative way. This is why we have written our expectations of potential open source contributors to make the expectations more transparent.