Internships

What’s Involved

Fairmind offers internships for college undergraduate and graduate students. An intern’s role is to be an assistant in the creation of a Fairmind guide. That means:

• Learning how to author for Fairmind Format
• Participating in the selection and scoping of the guide’s topic
• Researching the discourse on the topic
• Evaluating and organizing different arguments
• Collecting and sourcing relevant facts
• Proposing how to structure the guide’s “Factors to Consider” and “Example Viewpoints”
• Writing initial drafts of various sections and providing feedback on later drafts that have been refined by Fairmind’s founder or another experienced author
• Observing the external review process and helping decide how to assess and assimilate feedback

To be clear, the burden is not on you to write an entire guide or to be responsible for its final content. You will work with Fairmind’s founder. He will ensure your tasks are scoped to your abilities, mentor you, and be responsible for the guide’s final form and content.

A Testimonial

It was a great experience to work on the Electoral College guide. I had to learn a different way of thinking to maintain balance and to really understand the best in each side. The annotated example guide and other documentation were helpful in this, as were the weekly sessions with Steve [Fairmind’s founder]. During the phase with external reviewers, it was cool to get feedback from some of the leading scholars and advocates about the Electoral College versus a national popular vote. Seeing how Steve interacted with the reviewers and assimilated their feedback was really interesting. I feel like I gained important new skills, and I am proud of the guide I contributed to.

—Camille Moitrier--Cadart, graduate student in international relations at Columbia University, contributor to The Electoral College

What You Get

• Valuable skills that are rarely taught. How to represent disagreement in a way that advocates on each side can recognize as fair and accurate; how to make opposing arguments meet on the same ground rather than talk past each other; how to stay alert to your own assumptions and be transparent about your editorial choices. These skills complement traditional academic training, which is mostly about taking a position and defending it. They carry into law, policy, journalism, philosophy, and much else.

• A look inside expert review. You will see leading scholars and advocates on different sides of an issue respond to a draft. You will be part of the process for assessing and integrating their feedback.

• A published guide you contributed to. Your work will lead to a guide on Fairmind.org, used by the public, educators, policy-makers, and AI systems. It is something you can point to. Your name will be included in the guide’s “Acknowledgments” section.

• Mentorship. You will work directly with the project’s founder, Steve Krause.

• A recommendation letter and a reference. Assuming the work goes well, Steve will write you a letter of recommendation and remain available as a reference afterward.

What You Don’t Get

Fairmind is a public-service project, not an accredited educational program or incorporated nonprofit organization. So internships are not paid and not eligible for college credit. People do them for the experience, not the money or class units.

An internship is a voluntary arrangement, not employment, and either of us can end it at any time.

What’s Required

Fairmind is a U.S.-based project. Interns should be enrolled in a U.S. college or have graduated within the past six months, and be living in the United States.

Internships are ten to twelve weeks, with the expectation of roughly eight hours per week of work. The assumption is that you’re taking classes, working a job, or doing other things at the same time. It is possible to increase the weekly workload, thereby decreasing the total number of weeks.

All work is remote. You need to be available to meet for 30 minutes per week via video conference and be reasonably available to respond to other forms of communication between meetings.

No particular major or background is required, but you should be able to read widely, evaluate sources, and write clearly. The simplest self-test for this is to read a Fairmind guide, including the footnotes, and ask yourself whether you have written anything that took comparable care—for example, a research paper where every claim was sourced and every sentence had to hold up under scrutiny. It need not match a Fairmind guide, but if you’ve done nothing approaching that level of rigor, this opportunity is probably not for you.

Finally, a few important things:

• No conflicts of interest: On the topic you would be covering, you should not currently work for, have recently worked for, or been paid by a political party, campaign, or advocacy organization involved in that issue.

• No polarizers: Regardless of your topic, if you are a polarizing presence on social media, or if association with you could undermine Fairmind’s reputation for careful neutrality, this is not the right opportunity for you. We are looking for people with the temperament of an analyst or judge, not a prosecutor or pundit.

Interested?

If this feels like a fit, please contact us with your interest—just a quick note on who you are and why this opportunity appeals to you. We will then continue the conversation in an email response.