Each year the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS), of which Edinburgh Napier University is part, offers a number of 3-month full-time internships for PhD students. These provide opportunities for second and third year PhD students to develop a range of transferable skills, enhance their employability, and gain experience of working within a public sector organisation in a short (funded) break from their PhD studies.

The internships are offered by a number of organisations. In 2018 these are NHS Health Scotland, the Scottish Government, the Scottish Human Rights Commission, the Scottish Parliament Information Centre, and Skills Development Scotland (SDS).

Lyndsey Middleton

In January this year, Centre for Social Informatics PhD student Lyndsey Middleton (née Jenkins) successfully applied to take part in the 2018 internship scheme. Today she starts her internship with the eHealth division of the Scottish Government at St Andrews House, Edinburgh within the Policy and Strategy Workstream.

Lyndsey‘s internship is entitled Practitioner experiences of mobile working technologies. The work that she is undertaking contributes to research into (1) the impact of health practitioner use of technology on working processes and clinical practice, and (2) practitioner experiences of the implementation of the technology. (There is a fuller description of this internship in the summary of internships offered by the Scottish Government in 2018, available from the SGSSS web site: see internship 36.)

Here’s hoping that Lyndsey benefits from her internship as much as her fellow Centre for Social Informatics PhD student John Mowbray did last year, when he worked with the marketing team at SDS on research into the use of social media by young customers of SDS services.