Facility
Safari West
Closing Date
[jobclosingdate]
Description
Safari West offers a dynamic, educational and innovative internship for students. You will have the opportunity to work in a unique environment with a wide variety of species. Each internship opportunity has been specifically designed to provide the most enriching educational experience possible.
The observational animal behavior internship can focus on a variety of species we house at Safari West, as approved by the animal department manager. The goal of this internship is to integrate students into the current and newly proposed research projects taking place at Safari West. Our objective is to have students understand how to independently conduct a research project through searches for relevant peer-reviewed literature, data collection, data entry and simple data analysis. Internships can be done in collaboration with a university and we can offer academic credits as approved by an academic advisor. Students are expected to come up with a research question which allows for behavioral observations. Observations can include time budgets, preference tests and other behavioral measures. Students may enter the internship in teams or groups if applicable to the research question.
Internship Application Requirements:
Applicants must be 18 years of age. All internships are unpaid. At this time we are unable to offer housing accommodations, therefore housing and transportation are at the cost and responsibility of the intern. The intern must have reliable means to get to Safari West consistently before committing.
Completed internships are based off of fulfillment of designated hour and month requirements. Official start and end dates are flexible and will be determined by the applicants’ schedule.
Internship Requirements:
Availability: Completion of 100 hours including a consistent schedule of a minimum of 6 hours per week of observations (preferably 2 hours per day, 3 days per week) with the remainder spent on researching, writing and analysis
Fabrication requirement: Formation of research question, ethogram and data observation sheets and final paper
Data requirement: data collection, entry and entry-level data analysis
Must have personal computer to use with Microsoft excel and word for data analysis and writing final research paper
Collaborative requirement: Intern must be able to work as part of a team and take direction well and be able to interact with employees and guests in a professional manner
Self-motivated: Interns will be guided through the program but must be internally driven; they will be expected, after some time, to understand their daily responsibilities and be able to start their work without relying directly on orders
Completion of behavioral research paper
Final Paper
Interns will write a formal project proposal that needs to be approved by the internship coordinator. Students will be expected to write a research paper containing an abstract, introduction, methods, results and discussion
http://www.safariwest.com/conservation/internships/
Education and Pre-requisites
Not specified.
Compensation and benefits
None
Application instructions
Application deadline – September 1st
Please send a completed application (found on our website), resume and short cover letter, highlighting relevant experience, to Erika Mittelman at emittelman@safariwest.com. Not all applicants will be offered an internship position due to the high volume of qualified candidates who apply. All applicants will be notified of our decision by email or phone.