Charles Sturt encourages our HDR candidates to engage with industry and research end-users during their candidature through internships: short-term collaborations aimed at tackling specific industry challenges. The industry partners can be SMEs, large corporations, government or community organisations or not-for-profits (NFP) and the projects concomitant with, but not part of the candidate’s doctoral research.
This year we have seen strong growth in interest in internships from our HDR candidates who recognise how these opportunities help them to apply their research skills in real-word settings, build professional connections, explore career opportunities and gain valuable skills.
Miltone Kimori is currently undertaking an internship with Western Murray Land Improvement Group, an industry partner with the One Basin CRC. His internship explores how NFP organisations and local institutions can support rural resilience through community wealth building programs. Miltone has found the internship is giving him valuable insights into how NFPs are structured and operate in rural communities, planning and strategy around decision-making and resource allocation and collaborative approaches to protecting natural resources.
Several other HDR candidates have been successful in securing paid internships through APR.Intern, the highly competitive national program. Tim Green (Gulbali) recently completed a 3-month internship with CropLife. HIs project started as research translation – converting research papers into more digestible forms for policy and public – and ended up with him creating literature reviews and factsheets on several topics. “I saw it as an opportunity to expand my network in Canberra and to dip a toe into policy advising”, Tim said. “I made some excellent contacts that I will definitely use in the future… getting paid was also a massive benefit.”
Sarah Condran, (SCME) has secured a 4-month paid internship with Lockheed Martin, who work closely with the Australian Defence and the innovation community to fast-track new technologies that support our national security. Sarah said, “we are very happy about the news and impressed with APR.Intern, who made the whole process a breeze.” The project is entitled ‘LLM-Guided Information Fusion’, and it explores how large language models (LLM) and agentic AI can be used to automatically analyse and combine information from different sources. The goal of the internship is to develop a LLM-based framework that can reason through data and make sense of it by connecting various data sources in a meaningful way.
Fellow HDR candidate Moshan Sheeraz (AICF) recently commenced an internship with Evernode Labs. His project is an innovative intersection of #blockchain, #governance, and #AI, focusing on how decentralized AI frameworks can enhance automated online dispute resolution.
To find out more about internships and how you can apply for an existing one or get help to develop a new one through APR.Intern visit the website or email us at HDR-Support@csu.edu.au