Internship Program

The Research Program offers challenging internship opportunities to full-time undergraduate and graduate students. The internship program is intended to benefit both students and DDOT.

• For the students, the internships enable them to acquire practical skills by working on specific transportation projects while also providing an educational experience that exposes them to state/local government and public policy.
• For DDOT, the program is an opportunity to advance projects of interest to the agency and helps to identify potential future employees (and promote the transportation industry as a whole).

The Research Program hosts both semester and summer interns. Semester interns work up to 20 hours per week, summer interns work 40 hours per week on-site at DDOT. Internships are paid (by the research program) and are highly competitive. Howard University manages the solicitation, selection, and administrative details for the program.

See Past Projects here

Students: Applying to be an intern

Summer internship applications are posted in late winter and are due in early spring. Interviews are done during the spring and matches made by April, generally. Semester internships are posted starting in August but can appear throughout the year. Students will be required to provide their current GPA, valid transcript, email address, and contact number when applying.

Find current postings on the Howard University Transportation Research Center website.

To be notified when internships are posted, fill out our interest form.

Project Managers: Requesting an intern

Interns are hosted throughout the agency to work on a specific project or small set of projects under the supervision of a DDOT staff member with expertise in that area. All research intern projects must have a research component. Project and program managers are encouraged to submit ideas to the Research Program throughout the year - more information is in our how-to article.

It's never too soon to start thinking about summer intern ideas - the latest call for projects is here (and in the how-to article's useful docs box) for your reference when thinking about future projects.

If your summer intern project is selected, please give our intern manager manual a read, which has a good run-down of the whole program and any questions that may come up. 

For Interns: DDOT FAQs

If  you're just starting as an intern at DDOT, there's a lot to learn, and you'll no doubt have a lot of questions! Our intern manual should help to answer most of them.