Programming/Digital Expertise Teaching Assistants for BSc Computational Social Science

Are you skilled in Python and in any of the following: web development, database management, machine learning, natural language processing and network analysis? Would you like to help teach students the foundations and advanced applications of these digital skills? Will you be studying in the academic year 2025-2026? We are looking for new additions to our team of Teaching Assistants and you may just be one of them!

Join us!
Computation Social Science is a collaboration between the faculties of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Science and Humanities. Students learn how to analyse ‘real world’ data on complex societal issues such as climate change, global health and digital surveillance to identify opportunities for (behavioural and systems) change and to design evidence-based intervention strategies. They will programme hands-on tools that support sustainable digital innovation and contribute to making the world a better place.

What are you going to do
Digital Expertise (DE) plays an essential role in all teaching and learning within Computational Social Science. There will be guest lectures, practical sessions and components of student group projects devoted to DE content. As a TA, you will be assigned to a fixed group of 20 students for the duration of 20 weeks (i.e. one semester) and will support them by:

• providing feedback and grading weekly individual DE assignments;
• supervising practical sessions;
• answering digital expertise-related questions.

The number of hours per week for which you will be hired can be aligned with your availability. In general, for the first–year course, 8-12 hours per week are required and for the second-year course, 12-14 hours per week are required.

What do you have to offer
We are looking for friendly, approachable and enthusiastic students who are willing and able to engage with international undergraduate students. You will need to know how to recognise and hold the line between guiding students’ independent learning and doing students’ work for them. Experience in teaching or group facilitation would be an asset. You must have an excellent command of English (spoken and written).

To join the Year 1 team:

• You are generally available for in-person teaching sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays.
• You have successfully completed courses that included (for a minimum of 12EC):
  
  • Programming, preferably in Python
  • Data cleaning and data visualisation (e.g. pandas, seaborn)
• Additionally, if you have experience in the following subjects, you will have the possibility to continue in this TA position during the Spring semester:
  
  • Web development (HTML, CSS, and Flask or other web app technologies)
  • Relational databases (SQL)

To join the Year 2 team:

• You are generally available for in-person instruction on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• You have successfully completed courses that included (for a minimum of 12EC):
  
  • Programming, preferably in Python
  • Machine learning (supervised and unsupervised methods in Scikit-learn and Statsmodels)
• Additionally, you have experience with some of the following subjects:
  
  • Scraping of static and dynamic websites (selenium, scrapy, Beautiful Soup)
  • API access and usage
  • Natural language processing (Gensim, nltk, spacy)
  • Network analysis (networkx)
  • Agent-Based Modelling
  • Timeseries Analysis
• Applicants should possess demonstrated expertise in a subset of the advertised skill areas and exhibit a strong willingness to learn and expand their knowledge in the remaining areas.

Please note: Current students of the BSc Computational Social Science cannot be considered for the role of Digital Expertise TA.

What else do we offer you
We offer a temporary contract for 8-14 hours per week at the Education Office Social Sciences. The starting date will be Friday, 15 August 2025. Employment will initially be for a semester. Upon positive evaluation and satisfactory performance, your contract may be extended. The UFO profile of student assistant employee applies. The salary is €2925 to €2981 gross per month based on full-time employment (38 hours per week). This excludes 8% holiday and 8.3% end-of-year bonus. The starting salary will be based on the number of ECTS gained as a student.

You will work in this team
You will be working in a team with approximately 20 other student assistants. Together, we strive to provide the best education for our students. Learning from each other and improving yourself are important values, as well as maintaining a positive and constructive attitude.

If you recognize yourself in this profile and are interested in the role, we look forward to receiving your motivation letter and CV. You can apply via the red button until 30 May 2025. Interviews will take place in the week of 23 June 2025. For questions about the vacancy, you can contact:

For Year 1: Gizem Aktas: g.aktas@uva.nl

For Year 2: Lukas Ansteeg: l.w.ansteeg@uva.nl