Product Designer Intern, Summer 2020

Job Description

Founded by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a new kind of philanthropy that’s leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges. Across three core Initiative focus areas—Science, Education, and Justice & Opportunity—we pair engineering with grantmaking, impact investing, policy work, and advocacy to help accelerate the pace of social progress.

We believe we can help build a future for everyone. Our values include:

• We aim to be daring, but humble. We look for bold ideas—regardless of structure and stage—and help them scale by pairing technologists with subject matter experts to build tools that accelerate the pace of social progress.
• We want to learn fast, but build for the long-term. We want to iterate fast and help bring new solutions to the table, but we also realize that important breakthroughs often take decades, or even centuries.
• Stay close to the real problems. We engage directly in the communities we serve because no one understands our society’s challenges like those who live them every day.

Our success is dependent on building teams that include people from different backgrounds and experiences who can challenge each other's assumptions with fresh perspectives. To that end, we look for a diverse pool of applicants including those from historically marginalized groups — women, people with disabilities, people of color, formerly incarcerated people, people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or gender nonconforming, first and second generation immigrants, veterans, and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

The Opportunity

In the Education Initiative, we aim to ensure that all young people enter adulthood with the knowledge, skills, habits, and agency they need to realize their full potential. We collaborate with students, educators, and families to create educational tools and experiences that apply what we know from the fields of learning science and human development to education.

An example of our work is our partnership with Summit Learning—an approach to education developed by Summit Public Schools in partnership with learning scientists, researchers, and academics. With Summit Learning, students gain the skills, knowledge and habits to succeed in college and enter adulthood with a clear vision for achieving purpose and wellbeing in life.

The Education Design Team provides students and teachers with the digital tools they need to engage in personalized learning experiences. We're looking for a Product Design Intern passionate about education to join our team to support the development of the Summit Learning Platform.

You will

• Partner with other Designers, Product Managers, Engineers, Data Scientists, Researchers, Content Strategists, and Education experts to build learning experiences for students and teachers
• Contribute to product ideation
• Map user flows, prototype interactions, and collaborate with engineers to ship product
• Participate in classroom observations and user research with teachers and students
• Translate complex user needs into elegant design solutions
• Give and solicit feedback from designers and cross-disciplinary partners
• Communicate your design choices

You have or are

• Pursuing an Undergraduate or Graduate Degree (BS, BA, BFA, MA, MS) degree in Art, Design, Technology, Human Computer Interaction or related field and will have time remaining in school after your summer internship
• The ability to work for 12 consecutive weeks during the Summer 2020
• Graduating between December 2020 - June 2021
• Organizational skills and attention to detail
• A self-starter with strong communication skills (verbal, written and visual)

Nice to have

• Awareness of the process of building and shipping software
• Design experience from previous internships, work experience, academic research, lab work, or personal projects.
• Passion for education