Computing Support Student Consultant Program
Research Computing Services is a team of research facilitators with diverse backgrounds and skills in high-performance computing and data science. We work with IT partners to help Northwestern faculty, postdocs, and students perform computational research across all disciplines. Meet the team.
Student consultants are critical members of our team. As a part of our group, you will experience a broad range of paradigms in scientific computing and develop new technical, consulting, and teaching skills.
About the Program
As a Research Computing Support Student Consultant, you will support our Research Computing community by answering questions through our ticketing system and participating in one-on-one consultations. We will provide training and guidance to enable you to support our researchers, as these are not skills students usually learn in classes.After learning some skills on the job, you may develop documentation and learning materials that can be used to help researchers through the creation of How-to videos and workshops. Some examples of student-led workshops and How-to videos include:
- Introduction to the Text Editor: Vim
- Debugging Jobs on Quest
- Submitting Jobs and Navigating Quest
- Applying to Access Quest
- Analyzing user connection data to the Quest Analytics nodes
- Updating the MPI modules on Quest
- Benchmarking how fast GPU-accelerated Python software ran when installed via a container versus an Anaconda virtual environment
Eligibility
Undergraduate and graduate student consultants come from all schools and departments of the University and have expertise and experience in a wide range of programming languages, software programs, and technical skills.
Are you an undergraduate or graduate student interested in supporting research at Northwestern? Do you enjoy learning new skills? Do you have Linux skills, or are you good at helping people solve problems? Then, being a Computing Support Student Consultant could be for you!
Applicants should be comfortable researching solutions to technical problems and explaining technical concepts to people of various abilities. They are expected to bring patience, respect, and professionalism to all aspects of their role. The candidates also need to have strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to work at least ten hours per week.
Depending on your interests and knowledge, the position can involve the use of one or more of the skills listed below:- Linux environment and software installations
- Data collection, cleaning, wrangling, analysis, and presentation
- A scripting language (such as Bash, Python, Java, Lua, Julia, Perl, Ruby, etc.)
- A statistical analysis program (such as R, Stata, SAS, MATLAB, etc.)
- Parallel computing (such as MPI, OpenMP, Spark, etc.)
Program Benefits
An exciting part of student consultant work is the opportunity to build professional skills and participate in weekly one-on-one meetings with staff mentors; you will collaborate with staff members to work on Northwestern IT projects.
In addition to improving on and gaining new technical skills, students get career experience as technical consultants, including:
- Interactions with student, faculty, and staff researchers across Northwestern
- Exposure to research and computing techniques outside of your academic field
- Networking with IT professionals
- Gaining career experience
- Career coaching and guidance from our team
- Join a community of students with similar interests who support and learn from each other through frequent discussions of technical and professional topics.
How to Apply
We hire undergraduate and graduate students as hourly employees. Throughout the year, we post calls for applications as positions become available. Please see our application form.
If you have questions about the student program, please email David Glass, Research Computing Support lead.