Job: Summer Research Assistant (Full Time)

PI: Gi-Wook Shin (Sociology and FSI)

Salary: $16/hr. for undergraduate, $20/hr. for master’s.

Period: 8-10 weeks

Stanford’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), seeks highly motivated and dedicated undergraduate and master’s students for a full-time, paid, 8- to 10-week summer research assistant position to begin work on June 24, 2019.

Professor Gi-Wook Shin is looking to hire up to five RAs who will engage in two research projects: 1) Talent Flows, Brain Hubs, and Socioeconomic Development in Asia and 2) U.S. Rivals: Construct or Reality?

Essential duties and responsibilities include, but are not limited to: reading and summarizing scholarly literature, collecting and analyzing data, conducting interview and surveys, and writing research briefs for principal investigators.

Eligibility and How to Apply

Undergraduate or master’s students from any major are eligible to apply; interdisciplinary backgrounds and Asian language skills (especially Mandarin and Japanese) are a plus, but not required. Applications from majors in the social sciences and humanities as well as the natural sciences and engineering fields are all welcomed.

This role requires strong social media skills, excellent verbal and written communication, time management and organizational skills, and the ability to synthesize empirical, theoretical, and technical data from multiple sources.

Candidates must be enrolled at Stanford University as an undergraduate or master’s student. Candidates may be U.S. citizens, permanent residents, or foreign nationals legally residing in the United States and must have a Social Security Number.

Interested applicants should submit (1) a cover letter describing the applicant’s interest in the position and assessment of her/his strengths for conducting research; (2) a résumé/curriculum vitae detailing education, relevant coursework, extracurricular activities, and any past research experience; and (3) a letter of recommendation to Ms. Joyce Lee at jyklee@stanford.edu.

Review of applications will continue until the positions are filled.

Beatriz Magaloni, Professor of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Director of the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (PoVgov) is seeking to hire an Undergraduate Research Assistant. Professor Magaloni's work is focused on governance, poverty reduction, electoral clientelism, the provision of public goods, and criminal violence in Latin America. 

The Undergraduate Research Assistant will work with Professor Magaloni during the 2018-2019 academic year on a project related to violence and organized crime in Mexico that focuses on understanding the spatial dynamics of crime. The Research Assistant will collaborate with the PoVgov team in gathering data on crime indicators, especially homicides, and georeferencing gang and criminal activity at the electoral district, neighborhood, and block levels. 

Responsibilities as a Research Assistant will include a variety of tasks that provide training in cutting-edge quantitative research methods, such as web scraping, geocoding, and data visualization. The Research Assistant will also collaborate in writing and creating presentations, and editing research papers. The Research Assistant will interact with graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and other collaborators regularly in a team-oriented environment. This role serves as an ideal bridge into graduate studies for undergraduate students interested in empirical research and social development issues in Latin America. 

Applicants should be juniors or seniors majoring in computer science, economics, political science, public policy, or other related disciplines. Ideal candidates must have strong quantitative and data analysis skills and excellent written and verbal communication skills. Fluency in Spanish and proficiency in the use of STATA, R and Python are highly desirable. 

Responsibilities: 

 Data entry of individual surveys on crime perceptions. 

 Organize and update current databases. 

 Prepare data for quantitative analysis. 

 Assist with web scraping. 

 Assist with statistical modeling (econometrics). 

 Assist with data visualization. 

Qualifications: 

 Senior or junior undergraduate student. 

 Proficiency in Spanish. 

 Intermediate knowledge of STATA and R or Python. 

 Intermediate knowledge of statistics, econometrics, and impact evaluation. 

 Intermediate level of proficiency in LaTeX. 

 Comfortable working with large data sets. 

 Willingness to learn and build knowledge on Latin America, particularly on topics such as crime and violence, governance, and development. 

 Detail-oriented, including the ability to accurately clean and organized data. 

Please send resume or CV, and cover letter to clopezm@stanford.edu AND grobles@stanford.edu