Are you wondering what it’s like to pursue an internship at 52°North (52N)? Well, this blog post aims to describe exactly that. My name is Merel and in this blog post will take you through my experience of doing a six-month internship at 52N.

After completing my bachelor’s degree in my hometown Amsterdam and developing an interest for geoinformatics during my bachelor’s thesis, I decided to make the move to Germany and started my master’s degree in Geoinformatics and Spatial Data Science at the University of Münster, Germany, in 2021. During one of the regular presentations at the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), I found out about 52N. Ben Gräler informed about 52N’s commitment to open science, non-profit ethos, and the opportunity to contribute to meaningful projects addressing societal challenges immediately aroused my interest. So I decided to apply for an internship.

As an intern, I was part of the Spatial Data Science team and I worked on the I-CISK project. The I-CISK project is an exciting international research project that aims to develop tailored climate services for seven regions, spanning across Europe and Africa. All these regions are faced with different consequences of the climate crisis and need different kinds of information provision, carved to their needs.

To contribute to this climate service, I started out with developing prototypes for uncertainty visualization in an RShiny application, using local data provided by the Spanish project partners. The next item I worked on was the integration of OpenSenseMap data into the GeoNode framework, using a Python Django application and celery tasks. I also got some first impressions of using Docker.

Another interesting part of my internship was attending multiple co-design meetings between 52N and the stakeholders of the project. These were always fruitful discussions about the stakeholders’ needs and how we can turn these wishes into apps as developers. This way we collectively set goals for the next steps in the platform development.

Basically, almost everything I worked on was new to me, but with the support from colleagues, learning was a lot easier and also fun. As an intern you’re taken seriously and given the opportunity to develop new skills, while also being able to make contributions to the projects. I had a great time doing an internship at 52N!