Become our writer/support intern and help others create data visualizations

Edit April 6, 2020: Thanks to your interest in this internship! We got a lot of emails with applications before and after our deadline (Sunday, 8th of March). A week or so ago, we decided on an intern, and we’re very excited about that. So to save you and us some time, we removed the email address from the “how to apply” part at the bottom of this article. Follow this blog or follow us on Twitter (@datwrapper) to learn about the next time we have an open position!

We at Datawrapper want to help everyone to create better charts, maps, and tables. To achieve this, we offer a beginner-friendly online tool, but we don’t stop there. To truly help everyone, a big part of our job is to support individual users and to teach good data visualization to people from all over the planet with blog posts, tutorials or workshops.

You can help us do exactly that.

We are looking for a writer and/or support intern (female/male/whatever) to join our team in Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg, for 3 months minimum.

As a writer and/or support intern, you’ll work together with Elana (head of customer success) and Lisa (head of communication).

What you’ll do

That depends on your strengths and what you’d like to learn! If you have fun at supporting our users, you’ll mainly do that. If you’re more into writing articles, you’ll focus on that.

Let’s look at what these two areas entail.

Supporting our users means you’ll help users at organizations like The Times, Süddeutsche Zeitung or SPIEGEL ONLINE to create great data visualizations. When they come to us with a question like “Is it possible to do x with Datawrapper?”, you’ll find a solution.

Other days, users write in because something seems to be broken or isn’t working. You’ll figure out what’s going on. Have they made a mistake? Is there a problem with their dataset? Have they misunderstood a feature? Or is there a bug in Datawrapper? If you think it’s a bug, you’ll try to reproduce it, narrow it down, maybe even fix it. We welcome people who like to code or want to get into it, but it’s definitely not a requirement for this internship.

And don’t worry: We don’t want you to work through user emails as quickly as possible. Instead, we want you to truly understand the user’s needs and help them out as much as you can. If that means reorganizing their data or figuring out a workaround for them for 3 hours, then so be it.

You won’t do it alone: Elana will be there to teach and help you. (She’s great at finding workarounds!) You’ll learn how individuals, companies and newsrooms all over the world are using a charting tool like ours to tell data stories, and you’ll get an understanding of all kinds of UI and UX questions that lie behind the design of a charting tool. And of course, you’ll make many people happy! It’s super rewarding to help others on an individual basis.

Writing articles means you’ll bring the knowledge you got while working with users in support to everyone, in the form of tutorials for our Academy, Weekly Charts, blog posts, and social media (if you fancy that – no need, though).

You’ll brainstorm ideas for articles with Lisa, learn how to structure texts, how to use a friendly tone, be precise and in general explain things to others.

Here too, we value quality over quantity. We don’t want you to write as many articles as possible. We want you to write articles that are as good as possible.

No matter what your focus in this internship will be, you’ll learn how to work with data and how to create good- (or even-better!-)looking visualizations. You’ll also get many insights into the world of product development and explore the life at, and culture of a friendly software startup.

Are you a good fit?

To make this a fun internship, these skills & traits are helpful:

• You have great written English skills. You simply love language. Grammar might not be important to others – but you care.
• You like helping people. You truly want to be helpful. You can easily put yourself into the shoes of another person. Questions like “What are they trying to achieve? What do they need? How could I help?” come naturally to you.
• You have a desire to help people to create charts. Beautiful things and good communication make you happy. You don’t need to be a designer, but you like to look at data visualizations, and you’re not afraid of data.
• You’re curious. You know that only when you understand something yourself, can you actually explain it and pass it on to others. When you’re confronted with something new, you keep asking yourself “Why? How? But WHY?” until you really get it. That also applies to new software: You don’t sweat when you need to use a new app. What happens if you click on that tiny icon? You simply find out.
• You’re more of an “attention to detail” than a “move fast & break things” personality. You don’t like making mistakes that could have been prevented with the knowledge you already have. You’re thorough and careful, even if that means you’re slower than the others.

Working at Datawrapper

We’re a team of 13 friendly people based in Berlin, most of us developers, all of us data vis fans.

FAQs

How much will I get paid?
No matter if you’re a student or not, you’ll get the German minimum wage of €1,621.00 for a full-time internship. You can also choose to only work 4 days a week. In this case, your wage would be proportionally less.

When can I start?
Mid-April in the best case, but any other following month/week works, too. We’re flexible.

Can I be a remote intern?
No, sorry. We can teach you most when you’re physically in our office at Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin.

Could the position become more permanent after the internship?
Yes. If you’re looking for a permanent job, please let us know in your application.

I’m only interested in supporting others / writing articles.
Apply anyways! As a support intern, there might be times when writing an Academy article just makes the most sense to support users best. And as a writing intern, you’ll need to have the needs of our users in mind anyways. But we have enough work to do in both areas – so let us know your preferences in the application, and we’ll take them into consideration.

I might want to do both, supporting and writing? But I’m not sure yet.
If you don’t know yet what you want to focus on, we’ll find that out together. It’s no problem to discover half-way into the internship that you’d rather focus on supporting users than writing blog posts – or the other way round.

How to apply

Does this internship like something you’d like to do? Yay! We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

1. Talk a bit about yourself and how your skills, attitude, and experience could be a good fit for this internship. An attached CV won’t hurt.
2. Find the “Inset map” feature in our locator map tool and explain it in-depth as you would for a blog post or an Academy article. Keep in mind what users want to achieve with this feature.
3. Ask us all the questions you might have!

We want you to apply especially if you’re from a group that’s underrepresented in our office. (That includes women.)

If we think that you’d be a good fit for the internship, we’ll invite you to a video call or to our office. We’re located in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin:

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

The Datawrapper team