Whether it is for an interest in the social sciences and their subjects, or whether it is to prepare for a course with application to real data (data science, applied mathematics, etc.), it is possible to do a sociology internship.
The internship offers the opportunity to get a real introduction to this discipline. Processing a database, conducting interviews or even carrying out a field survey, immersing yourself in the daily life of research. Recurrent discussions with experienced researchers will enable you to make rapid progress.
There are many topics available, to be decided between the student and their supervisor. They may, of course, relate to X and its schooling, forms of sociability, the future of students, etc. But they can also be about another topic of the discipline, classic or emerging: the genesis of tastes, the choice of spouse, collective mobilisation, changes in the labour market and capitalism, the rationale for religious commitment in adulthood, the place of layperson in contemporary politics, the use of new technologies, journalism and its actors, etc.
The internship can also emphasize on questions of methods, where the engineer training can be applied directly. It is particularly true in the case of digital big data processing, which provide a fresh look at some of the classic questions of the discipline. Are dating sites changing the well-established trend towards homogamy ? (based on online interaction data), have the registers of protest changed (from the cahiers de doléance to the online registers of the great national debate)? Is big data changing political campaigns (based on indicators created by parties and startups)?
Methods from machine learning that could be studied during the polytechnician syllabus can then be applied and developed. Building a face recognition classifier to help archivists spot celebrities on photographies, refining a voice recognition model for speech analysis, implementing textual analysis methods on a press corpus are all possible entry points for putting technology at the service of the social sciences, while at the same time developing it.
These few examples illustrate the multitude of possible approaches and questions. Interested students can contact the teacher directly to discuss the subject.
- Teaching coordinator: Ollion Etienne