Several New Zealand university students took up the opportunity to join Te Pūnaha Matatini’s 2019-20 summer internship programme, with paid 10-week placements working on research projects with a variety of our partner organisations.

Once again, our student interns had a range of backgrounds and came from all parts of the country, but they all shared a common desire to make the world a better place through the application and analysis of data, while gaining on-the-job experience.

“This programme is now its fifth year of operation and each year we have had an amazing group of students take up some fantastic opportunities with our partners,” said Kathryn Morgan, Research Operations Coordinator at Te Pūnaha Matatini. “The core objectives remain the same as previous years – providing students with invaluable data analytics experience and insights into working for organisations in the real world.”

The 2019-20 programme featured some very interesting projects involving a mix of both public and private sector work. Here we profile a few of the projects our interns worked on:

Developing complex systems models – Ministry for the Environment

A team of three interns in our programme were placed with the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) where they piloted a complex systems approach to modelling policy problems.

Shnece Duncan, a University of Canterbury Master of Commerce in Economics student, Ellena Black, a University of Auckland Honours degree graduate in Applied Mathematics, and Quyen Nguyen, a University of Otago Finance PhD student, looked at how various aspects of New Zealand’s economy, financial system and environment could be more effectively modelled to improve MfE policy.

“Using a complex systems approach, the models we developed aimed to better understand the cumulative impacts of multiple policies and stressors on the environment and people. As an example, we developed a simulation model that explored the on-farm adoption of new practices in New Zealand. Each farmer was modelled as a separate agent within neighbourhood and social networks. Each farm was modelled to be at a different life-cycle stage, producing either sheep, beef, dairy, or forestry products, with different decision-making strategies. We would like to extend a huge thank you to the MfE, especially senior analyst Jack Bisset, for their support and guidance throughout our internship.”

Analysis of a complex organisation’s carbon footprint – Te Pūnaha Matatini

Two of our interns analysed data on Te Pūnaha Matatini’s carbon emissions over the past few years to better understand our past and current performance in this area.

Ebba Olsen, a University of Auckland Bachelor of Science student majoring in Mathematics and Logic and Computation, and Kahu Te Kani, a University of Canterbury Bachelor of Science graduate with a major in Mathematics and Economics, produced a detailed report that will be used to guide future Te Pūnaha Matatini decisions regarding the need for staff to fly in particular.

“As with any organisation we could lower our CO2 emissions if we simply flew less,” wrote Ebba and Kahu. “We could hold more meetings remotely, for example over Skype, or use other more environmentally-friendly modes of transportation – if travelling is absolutely necessary. However, an obvious hurdle in using these other modes of transportation is the lack of efficient inter-city transport options across New Zealand.”

Ebba’s and Kahu’s internship supervisor, Te Pūnaha Matatini Director Shaun Hendy, is a well-known advocate for flying less to reduce our impact on the climate, and has written extensively on the subject.

“We would encourage other organisations to conduct a similar analysis of their CO2 emissions and to reduce them where possible,” said Shaun.

Creating an app to enrich the network visualisation experience – Nebula Data

Shih-Hao (Samuel) Chen, a University of Auckland Bachelor of Engineering study majoring in software engineering, worked with Te Pūnaha Matatini start-up Nebula Data during his summer internship.

The main objective of this project was to develop an application that would provide analysts with an enhanced way to see (visualise) networks.

“Networks arise in all shapes and forms in our everyday lives,” said Samuel. “However, [their features] are challenging to interpret, and transforming the dataset into a useful visualisation relies on inflexible third-party applications. We wanted to build a supportive, customisable tool that would enable data analysts to uncover new observations.”

Further details about individual and team projects

Following the completion of their placements, some of our interns wrote about their experiences and their detailed reports are available on Te Pūnaha Matatini’s website. Read more about the work of Shnece, Ellena and Quyen with MfE, Kahu and Ebba with Te Pūnaha Matatini, and Samuel with Nebula Data.