Current placement opportunities

OOC DTP placement opportunities are advertised here when they become available. 

Expand All

 

Organisation: Historic Royal Palaces

Location of Placement: Bodleian Weston Library, Oxford; British Library, The National Archives, Tower of London/Hampton Court Palace, London; University of Nottingham.

Placement Duration: 3 months

Placement Dates: July - September 2024

Lead Contacts: Dr Alden Gregory, Curator of Historic Buildings, HRP; Dr Rachel Delman, Heritage Partnerships Coordinator, University of Oxford

 

About the Organisation

Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) is an independent charity that is responsible for six magnificent and historically significant royal palaces: HM Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London (a UNESCO World Heritage Site); Hampton Court Palace; Kensington Palace; Banqueting House, Whitehall (the sole surviving part of the historic Palace of Whitehall); Kew Palace, Queen Charlotte’s Cottage and the Pagoda (within Royal Botanic Gardens Kew); and Hillsborough Castle and Gardens, the monarch’s official residence in Northern Ireland. HRP is also an Independent Research Organisation (IRO) and undertakes research to inform the world class conservation and interpretation they deliver for all of their sites.

Placement Description

Building the Tudor Palaces:

Collectively, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the British Library, The National Archives and the University of Nottingham Special Collections hold a series of original manuscripts detailing building work at the Tower of London, Whitehall Palace, and other English royal palaces, in the period 1532-44. Compiled by the Surveyor of the King’s Works, James Nedeham, the bound volumes contain quarterly accounts detailing the work of masons, bricklayers, joiners, carpenters, plumbers and other craftspeople in a period when Henry VIII was investing vast sums into art and architecture. The records, therefore, represent an invaluable resource for architectural, royal, and social history in this period. Working in-person in the relevant archives, the successful candidate will produce summaries of the content of all the volumes to act as a calendar or finding aid for them, and a report with suggested next steps for turning the calendar produced into a usable online resource for researchers. The final outputs will be shared with senior curatorial staff at Historic Royal Palaces and the Oxford Heritage Partnerships team as a reference point for HRP staff, and will inform future research on the people, places and goods documented. The candidate will have the opportunity to meet regularly with the supervisory team and HRP staff, both in-person in Oxford and on-site in London, and via Teams video calls. The placement will provide the candidate with key insights into curatorial research for a leading UK Heritage organisation.

 

Skills, Knowledge or Experience needed

The candidate will require experience of handling archival materials and proficiency in early modern English palaeography for this project. They will be required to undertake a related recruitment task as part of the selection process, and will need to state their experience of handling and transcribing late medieval/early Tudor documents in their application materials.

Much of the work will need to be carried out in person in the relevant archives in Oxford, London and Nottingham. It is estimated this may require between 1 and 3 weeks on site at each location. It is envisaged that the student will photograph archival documents and analyse them remotely where possible to save travel and accommodation costs (which will be costed and approved by the DTP once the home location of the successful candidate is known). Please write to training@oocdtp.ac.uk if you have questions about the content or logistics of this placement.

Enthusiasm for a career in the Heritage sector and/or Libraries and Archives would be an advantage.

How to Apply

Please send a CV and a short statement of interest to training@oocdtp.ac.uk by 5pm on Monday 6 May 2024.

 

Organisation: BT

Location of Placement: Adastral Park (near Ipswich) and Remote/Hybrid

Placement Duration: 3 months

Placement Dates: TBC

Placement Description

Like all major organisations, BT is aware that the development of AI may change the nature of work within the business in coming years. While some current roles could be rendered superfluous, more likely is the significant adaptation of existing roles to require new skills in deploying AI and interpreting its results. While this shift holds considerable promise it is also likely to generate, in the transition period, disruption to the status quo and staff apprehension.  

 

Although BT is a business with a technical mission, primarily staffed by engineers and others with technical and scientific competencies, it also wishes to consider what arts & humanities disciplines can bring to their internal discussions of AI and its likely impacts. BT thus offers an opportunity for an OOC student to work with one of its Research & Innovation scientists to develop a placement addressing an aspect of the broad question: what can arts & humanities research bring to BT’s thinking around the impact of AI within the business?

 

Potential placement ideas could include (but are not limited to):

  • A broad philosophical or conceptual evaluation of the state of AI research in humanities disciplines, parsing latest findings and presenting these in formats relevant for different BT teams. What should BT know about Humanities AI research?
  • An investigation into cultural perceptions of the promise of AI and its likely impact on the nature of work. If cultural perceptions of AI help determine the course of its development and adoption, nationally and internationally, what might this mean for teams at BT?
  • An exploration of current views on AI within different teams at BT. On the assumption that participation in decision-making around the adoption of AI will influence the success of deployment, what processes should BT put in place to capture the hopes and apprehensions of a range of colleagues?

 

Regardless of precise focus, the placement will likely involve:

  • Preparatory work with BT staff to scope the project and its methodology.
  • Desk research into relevant academic work on AI and the changing nature of work.
  • On site and remote interviews and data gathering with BT staff and teams (in the first instance at Adastral Park, Suffolk). All expenses will be covered by the DTP.
  • Preparation of a report, presentation or other output for onward use by BT in business planning.

 

The advantages of undertaking this placement include:

  • An interesting intellectual challenge and the opportunity to help develop important insights into AI and the changing nature of work.
  • The acquisition and honing of a broad range of transferable skills, including interviewing technique, data handling and report writing.
  • Enhancement of CV and employability. A previous OOC student who undertook a placement with BT noted that it was ‘a major factor in securing a non-academic job offer immediately after my PhD’.
  • Experience of a commercial workplace and of a diverse range of different departments therein.

Skills, Knowledge or Experience needed

This placement is open to all Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP students but may be of particular interest to students based in:

 

  • Language and Linguistics
  • History (particularly History of Science/Science of ideas/ Economic and Social History)
  • Philosophy
  • Design 

How to Apply

Please send a CV and a short statement of interest (c.250 words) to training@oocdtp.ac.uk by 5pm on Monday 6 May.

 

Organisation: BT

Location of Placement: Adastral Park (near Ipswich) and Remote/Hybrid

Placement Duration: 3 months

Placement Dates: TBC

Placement Description

BT, in common with most businesses, gathers data on the satisfaction (or otherwise) of its customers. Various metrics (such as Net Promoter Score and Quality of Service score) are deployed in attempts to transform diverse customer experiences into useable data. All these metrics, however, suffer flaws. The data to be captured is usually prespecified (meaning result parameters are, to an extent, predetermined) and the review mechanisms tend to imagine rational consumers making objective choices. In fact, consumer responses to products and services are often driven by emotions (both positive and negative), which existing customer experience capture mechanisms find difficult to evaluate and respond to.

 

BT would like to offer a placement opportunity for an OOC student to work with one of its Research scientists to develop a placement focussed on assessing and improving aspects of its customer experience information gathering. BT would be particularly interested in exploring how arts & humanities perspectives could aid their thinking around how to capture and measure the more subjective or emotional aspects of customer experience.

 

Potential placement ideas could include (but are not limited to):

 

  • Research, in conjunction with colleagues at BT, into social media platforms where BT products and services are discussed. What role does emotion play in the discussions which take place and how can knowledge of this assist BT’s customer-facing teams?
  • An evaluation of BT’s existing customer experience metrics but from an arts & humanities perspective. What is not captured, and why? Are other methods of collecting data on the emotion and subjectivity of individual experiences possible to conceive?
  • An exploration of research into emotion in relation to intangible products (such as, for example, mobile broadband). What are the primary drivers of both objective and subjective responses to products which consumers experience indirectly (e.g. via gaming/streaming)?

 

Regardless of precise focus, the placement will likely involve:

  • Preparatory work with BT staff to scope the project and its methodology.
  • Desk research into relevant academic work on the subjective nature of customer experience and the role of emotion in response to consumer products and services.
  • On site and remote interviews and data gathering with BT staff and teams (in the first instance at Adastral Park, Suffolk). All expenses will be covered by the DTP.
  • Preparation of a report, presentation or other output for onward use by BT in business planning.

 

The advantages of undertaking this placement include:

  • An interesting intellectual challenge and the opportunity to help develop important insights into the experience and opinion of customers.
  • The acquisition and honing of a broad range of transferable skills, including interviewing technique, data handling and report writing.
  • Enhancement of CV and employability. A previous OOC student who undertook a placement with BT noted that it was ‘a major factor in securing a non-academic job offer immediately after my PhD’.
  • Experience of a commercial workplace and of a diverse range of different departments therein.

Skills, Knowledge or Experience needed

This placement is open to all Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP students but may be of particular interest to students based in:

  • Language and Linguistics
  • History (particularly History of Science/Science of ideas/ Economic and Social History)
  • Philosophy
  • Design 

How to Apply

Please send a CV and a short statement of interest (c.250 words) to training@oocdtp.ac.uk by 5pm on Monday 6 May.