Unpaid Discovery Internship Program

The WEHI Research Computing Platform regularly provides unpaid internship opportunities via the Discovery Internship Program. Interns can get course credit through the University of Melbourne Data Science and Software Engineering programs, as well as Open Source Contributors from around the world. These internships are 100% remote.

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

We have three intakes per year - Semester 1 (March to May), Semester 2 (August to October), and Summer (November to February the next year). The intake dates currently available and hours per week are here. We have anywhere between 20 and 45 interns in an intake.

List of student intern projects (subject to availability and eligibility)

Please note that applications for the Summer 2025 / 2026 intake have now closed.

Here are some of the recurring student intern projects and new projects we are working on.

We have had 251 interns through the program since Semester 2, 2021 who have provided over 24 person years of effort to help us uncover and document complexity early in over 80 intern projects.

Out of the 16 anonymous reviews that have been given by students as at 4th of June 2025, our internships have been rated a 4.6 out of 5.

Expectations during the internship

Before you apply - please ensure you can take the time to spend doing at least 6 to 8 hours per week on these internships:

1 hour a week for a project meeting with your supervisor and your teammates,
1 hour a week for a co-working session with your teammates,
1 hour a week keeping track of emails and organising yourself, and
the rest working on projects in your own time and asking 10+ questions a week at standups that run twice a day but are not mandatory

Also please ensure you:

ask 10+ questions a week about your project (this link shows you how many questions were asked in Intake 13 - Semester 2),
email a group weekly report before your meeting each week,
4 touch points per week with your supervisor (project meeting, weekly group email summary, and two other interactions)
keep an Individual Learning Plan (ILP) and a technical diary,
keep on top of the emails sent about your internship (there are a lot!),
keep an up to date calendar so you can plan your week, and
let your supervisor by email if you are unable to work on the internship.

Learn real world skills

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.

Types of projects

Many of the projects work in the Data Analysis and Research Software Engineering space using High Performance Compute (HPC). We work across diverse projects such as imaging, cryo-EM, genomics, transcriptomics, clinical informatics, and capacity planning.

We mainly work with projects that use R and Shiny, Python, Julia, bash, while also making the most out of other technologies such as RStudio, Jupyter notebooks, PowerBI and other applications within the data analytics space.

List of previous student intern project reports

Here are some of the previous student intern reports.

Previous Intern Reports

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.

Want to volunteer?