Student internships and co-op placements
Please note: There are presently no placement opportunities available for students.
Students will work with and be supervised by one of our scientists in a project-based assignment. The details of this arrangement will be finalized once the project and student’s learning goals have been determined. The student, the scientist and the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) will develop mutually agreeable goals by which the student will be evaluated. These goals will be set out in a contract at the beginning of the placement.
We will provide the student with a stipend, workspace, library access and computer, as well as the software needed for the project. We offer a multidisciplinary work environment, and students are invited to take part in regular Institute activities such as team or project meetings, journal clubs, educational sessions and plenaries.
About the Institute for Work & Health
IWH research focuses on two broad areas:
• the prevention of work-related injury and illness (primary prevention), which includes studies of programs, policies and practices, and the health of workers in the population at large
• the health and recovery of injured workers (secondary prevention), which involves research on treatment, return to work, disability prevention and management, and compensation policy.
We have developed expertise in statistical methods, analyzing qualitative data, conducting systematic reviews, and making our research relevant and accessible to practitioners and policy-makers through our knowledge transfer and exchange (KTE) activities. Our KTE department employs experts in knowledge transfer and communication. Its goals are to build stakeholder relations, build capacity among stakeholders to understand and make use of research, and to support the Institute’s activities through effective corporate communications. IWH has also hosted the Cochrane Back Review Group since 1996.
Because of the range of IWH research, our scientists come from a number of disciplines.These include the clinical, social and behavioural sciences, as well as epidemiology and biostatistics.
Qualifications
A placement with IWH will be best suited to senior students with a background in health sciences, epidemiology, clinical epidemiology or biostatistics, ergonomics or kinesiology. Students should have excellent written and oral communication skills, good organizational skills and a penchant for detail. They should also have computer-related skills in a variety of software applications, such as word processing, graphing, statistical (SAS) and qualitative analysis (Ethnograph, Invivo) and reference management.
Projects
Here are some projects that students have worked on.
Supporting systematic reviews
Students supported teams conducting systematic reviews of the literature. They were senior students with skills related to project coordination and conducting systematic reviews, such as assessing study design and risk of bias, extracting data, and analyzing and reporting results.
During this practicum, students worked with Institute-led teams conducting systematic reviews and assisted the editorial staff of the Cochrane Back Review Group with a number of activities. These included hand-searching select medical journals for trials, co-ordinating the work-flow of the systematic review, writing plain language summaries, collecting data to help answer questions about developing trends in the risk of bias in trials in the health-care literature on neck and back pain, and conducting manuscript audits to check data accuracy, to name a few.
Assisting knowledge transfer and exchange
Under the direction of a knowledge transfer associate, this senior student helped prepare research alerts, plain language summaries and presentations to audiences on new OHS and clinical research. The student also assisted in the organization and preparation of various meetings and workshops to share IWH research findings with our clinical networks (kinesiologists, occupational therapists, etc.).
Providing library and information support
This placement was filled by a student in the second year of course work towards a master’s degree in information studies. The student provided support to the Cochrane Back Review Group.
Under the direction of the information specialist of the Cochrane Back Review Group, the student supported review authors who were conducting systematic reviews in the field through a combination of activities: running specific searches of electronic databases, searching selected journals, and screening the results from electronic database searches to identify reports of controlled trials of treatment for back and neck pain. The selected articles are shared with individual authors or included in the Cochrane Back Review Group Trial Register.
Enquiries
Questions about eligibility or the application procedure should be directed to Vicki Pennick at vpennick@iwh.on.ca.
Please note: There are presently no placement opportunities available for students.
