We’re hiring a Tufts student as a content editor to assist with improving AquaPedia. All the details are below:
Responsibilities
- Work with authors who are adding case studies to the database — assist with editing/formatting tasks, assist with adding it online, provide feedback and suggestions
- Fact check new content
- Repair grammatical, formatting, other errors
- Edit content for clarity, style, and generally make documents more pleasant to read.
- Perform research tasks to update existing cases or create new cases as needed
What we absolutely need
- Someone who isn’t afraid to dive into technical and technological tasks. If you don’t know any HTML or wikitext, you’ll need to be able to learn as you go.
- Someone who is familiar with reading documents containing scientific and legal terminology and can write academic summary/synthesis type documents. In other words: you should have read some different academic or legal documents in the past, and you should be confident that you can learn how to write and edit summaries/synthesis of such documents on the fly.
- Someone who can manage their own schedule, workspace/time and can speak up and reach out for assistance as needed. You’ll meet up with us on campus once every week or two, but otherwise work on your own.
- Someone with strong writing skills – both in terms of technical/academic and communicating via email. Virtually all communication on this project is via email.
- Someone who has an interest in water, science, governance, sustainability or adaptation.
- Someone who knows what Scopus, JSTOR, and ScienceDirect are … and how to access and use them at Tufts.
- Someone who knows how to properly use citations, the difference between summaries, paraphrases and direct quotes.
- Someone who can take criticism and learn from it.
- Someone who understands this is a paid collaborative learning opportunity. We understand that students applying for this job aren’t going to be extremely experienced at all job requirements. We also know that this project changes with time and the exact skills needed may change. We need someone who wants to learn more.
What we’d like
- An undergrad or grad student that will be around for at least 18 months. If its less, that’s okay — just wow us with your application.
- Someone who has familiarity with lightweight markup like wikitext or HTML and is comfortable using these kinds of tools for formatting written text — paragraphs, lists, adding emphasis, and simple tables, not anything more complicated than that. HTML/Wikitext fluency would be a huge bonus, but we know these skills can picked up quickly.
- Someone who is curious and prefers looking up the answers to questions and experimenting to find answers over always asking someone else directly.
- Someone who likes the idea of not only editing documents, but improving and building upon the previous work others started.
What you’ll get
- You’ll have the chance to work with case study authors — generally academic scholars, or water professionals in government or NGOs around the world.
- You’ll be proficient in Wikitext and have your name on 1000s of edits in an open knowledge database funded by the NSF.
- You’ll have significant input into your work assignments and help shape a growing collection of case studies online.
- You’ll have opportunities to do simple updating tasks that don’t stretch your brain power, and also to shape the growing body of knowledge in this project — which could mean research tasks, extensive writing assignments, etc. You’ll be able to shape this blend of challenges and hopefully match it to your schedule.
- You’ll have the freedom to do your best work according to your schedule. All the work is online.
- We’re paying 10-15 an hour for a maximum of 10 hours per week during the academic year. We might be able to do work during academic breaks, if you’re interested. We’ll work that out.
How to Apply
- Send an email to Amanda Repella at Tufts, tell me why you might want the job. You’ll need to attach the 2 items described below.
- Attach a writing sample or a link to one. It can be an excerpt from an academic paper or something you wrote for the web. This is just to prove you understand basic concepts of academic/professional writing, not to judge your literary prowess or breadth of knowledge. Less than 2 pages, include the citations/refs/footnotes for the section (if any). Feel free to provide context (if an excerpt) as an informal intro or in the email.
- Attach a 1 – 2 page resume, so we know what you’ve been up to lately and what your academic/professional interests/accomplishments are.
