Application for an internship

Welcome! We are happy to learn about your interest in an internship at our institute.

Student internship

We strongly encourage interested students to apply for our Max Planck Summer Internship Program. (Please note: The program will not take place in summer 2024 for organizational reasons.)

In addition to this program, some labs accept direct applications. However, the number of internship applications by far exceed the available capacites. Due to the lack of time and space, we regret that we cannot always answer in the affirmative. 

Please consider the following prior to a direct application

To ensure that an internship at our institute is in accordance with your particular interests, please acquaint yourself with our research topics. The websites of the different departments and independent research groups will help you to decide which group's research complies best with your own area of interest.

Please note that internships (outside of MaxSIP) are currently not available in the following departments and groups:

  • Genes - Circuits - Behavior (Herwig Baier)
  • Circuits of Spatial Hearing (Benedikt Grothe)
  • Ornithology (Bart Kempenaers)
  • Neural Circuits for Vocal Communication (Daniela Vallentin)

For your application, please send a short cover letter to the leader of the group or department of your choice. In this letter, please explain in detail your reasons for applying to this particular group or department. In addition to the a CV and references, please include an approximate timeframe in which you could carry out the requested internship - long term internships are preferred.

Internship for school pupils

It's great to learn of the scientific interest and enthusiasm of pupils. However, school students who would like work in one of our laboratories need to be extensively safeguarded for security reasons. In general, we don't have the personnel capacity to guarantee for this. This means, regrettably, that we are not able to offer internships for pupils in our departments and groups.

Still, we consider it a pleasant duty to promote scientific interest, particularly among young people. We have thus expanded the number and scopes of classes in our students' and visitors' lab (MaxLab). Not only high school students, but also pupils from other grades are now able to work in the authentic MaxLab laboratory environment. One-day courses for high school classes, a young researcher's week in the summer holidays, or the introductory class molecular biology, are some course examples. The MaxLab also offers a one week internship for pupils in the German 9th and 10th grade. Due to organizational reasons, the time of this internship week is restricted to the time given on the MaxLab internet site.

For more information on these and other classes, please visit our MaxLab website

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