HCI Internship for HS Students

Pitched Late 2024 – Planned

What

• An HCI research internship for high school students in Bangladesh

• Bangladesh has technical implementation heavy ECs for HS students like olympiads and competitions but not research programs because they're slower and heavier

  • CHRF already proved this model works in Bangladesh
  • Building a program like this for HCI is easier & cheaper than CHRF's biomedical research
    • HCI research, particularly in its qualitative and empirical forms, relies more on critical thinking, observation, and systematic analysis than on advanced mathematics.

• Dr. Ahmed mentioned that an introduction to academia could be turned into a non-credited course at NSU if developed well.

  • I saved a lot of the resources that I used to learn, could be useful here.

• Harvard's CS50 uses a SSG to generate and keep track of their CS50 courses. This is relatively simple to implement. I plan on keeping all notes and resources opensource and add them to DIAL's website under the subdomain.

• Our demographic is likely to be T20 applicants as CHRF attracts the same types.

  • The west is skeptical of the work done in the global south so achievements/extracurriculars need vetted affiliations for credibility

Why

• When I first joined DIAL, I had no onboarding support. I had to "learn how to learn" research from scratch.

• CHRF has the only research internship for HS students in Bangladesh, but it's biomedical. There is no equivalent for CS let alone HCI research.

• The Blocker (2024): I pitched this in late 2024. Dr. Nova agreed in principle but identified three critical constraints:

  1. Capacity: DIAL lacked the infrastructure to onboard 15+ students.
  2. Legitimacy: The ECE Chair needed convincing that high schoolers could do valid research.
  3. The Trade-off: I was tasked with building the Research Lab Website first to solve the legitimacy/visibility problem before we could attempt the internship.
  4. I decided to also work on DIAL's foundational software and cultural architecture to solidify the ground before building something heavy on top of it.