Tender Student Assistant (f/m/d) Professorship for Global Security and Technology

15.04.2025, Studentische Hilfskräfte, Praktikantenstellen, Studienarbeiten

The Professorship of Global Security and Technology (TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology) is looking for a student assistant (f/m/d) starting in May 2025. The position has a scope of up to 8h/week for 6 months. The job offers you insights into the everyday university work and the research of Prof. Dr Katrin Paula (political mobilisation, political violence, protest diffusion, quantitative methods).

Requirements:

• Master’s student at a German University
• Ability to work in English and/or German in oral and written form
• Strong experience with Python programming, especially in NLP contexts
• Good knowledge about working with unstructured text data (i.e., information extraction, text classification, topic modeling, named entity recognition) and the common frameworks and libraries (e.g., Hugging Face Transformers, scikit-learn, PyTorch)
• Familiarity with working with large language models (LLMs), including using APIs and exploring techniques like prompt tuning or few-shot learning
• Experience with and ability to independently implement NLP projects (e.g., via an internship, working student position or seminars), including designing and evaluating different solution strategies
• A keen interest in social science research, and
• Good knowledge of and interest in statistics, computational methods, and/or informatics
• Independent, careful, and structured handling of tasks
• Ability to work in a team and communicate well

Tasks:

• Work closely with the team to identify and evaluate suitable NLP approaches for a project in the field of protest research, while independently driving the technical exploration and implementation
• Develop and compare different strategies (e.g., rule-based, supervised learning, or LLM-based) for extracting structured information from unstructured protest descriptions
• Design and implement prototypes using Python and common NLP libraries
• Assist in annotating a subset of the data to train or evaluate models
• Preparation and processing of research data
• Literature research
• General support of the professorship, as needed

We offer:

• An interesting and challenging job in a motivated team
• The opportunity to work on an NLP project in a socially and politically relevant research context
• Flexible working hours that can be adapted to your study schedule
• The work can be done remotely via home office, and regular meetings take place at Richard-Wagner-Straße 1, Munich at the offices of the professorship
• Remuneration is based on the current remuneration rates for student assistants at the Technical University of Munich

Application:

If we have sparked your interest, please send your detailed application (including letter of motivation, CV, and current transcript of records) in electronic form as a single pdf file with the subject line: SHK_GST_2025 to gst-admin@hfp.tum.de.

The application deadline is 29.04.2025.

We are looking forward to your application!

TUM strives to raise the proportion of women in its workforce and explicitly encourages applications from qualified women.

The position is suitable for persons with disabilities. Disabled applicants will be given preference in case of generally equivalent suitability, aptitude and professional performance.

When you apply for a position with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), you are submitting personal information. With regard to personal information, please take note of the Datenschutzhinweise gemäß Art. 13 Datenschutz-Grundverordnung (DSGVO) zur Erhebung und Verarbeitung von personenbezogenen Daten im Rahmen Ihrer Bewerbung (data protection information on collecting and processing personal data contained in your application in accordance with Art. 13 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)) at https://portal.mytum.de/kompass/datenschutz/Bewerbung/. By submitting your application, you confirm that you have acknowledged the above data protection information of TUM.

Find out more about us at: https://www.tum.de/en/, and https://www.hfp.tum.de/en/gst/home/

Kontakt: gst-admin@hfp.tum.de