Professional Opportunities Outside the Schedule

The master programme includes an internship, this can be done as a demonstrator (by teaching two different statistics courses for the Faculty's undergraduates), or as a two-month workplace internship, or as a four-month research assistance with a departmental instructor. The university is in contact with various corporations and research institutes and provides assistance in finding a suitable internship. Based on the experiences, the internship helps the students in their job search after graduating.

The classes that can be taught as a demonstrator are small, practical courses. The programme is an excellent opportunity for students to gain insight into the teaching tasks and to gain routine in situations where they have to give an account of their knowledge in front of a larger audience, such as a conference.

In addition to our instructors, students are also supported by external specialists in thesis writing. We place great emphasis on the thesis showing the critical and independent professional thinking of its author and proving that the professional socialization was successful. The thesis plan is defended by our students in front of the faculty committee in the form of a short presentation. Multiple theses were published in journals or at conferences.

Several students joined the Róbert Angelusz Advanced College of Social Sciences (webpage is only in Hungarian). The college was formed by students in 2003. Their goal was to create a permanent forum suitable for an inspiring scientific dialogue and exchange of ideas, which could bring together those interested in the social sciences. The Advanced College organizes courses in all areas of social sciences, actively participates in researches, organizes events and discussions, and organizes the Advanced College Night cultural and professional festival every year.

We also provide opportunities for students to expand their knowledge outside of classroom courses, such as our series of student evenings. Our students participate in international Young Statisticians Meetings every year, both as audience and speakers. This series of events is organized annually with the participation of the organizing committee of the department, as an international (incl. Austria, Croatia, Italy, Slovenia, Hungary) meeting of young statisticians. The purpose of the conference series is to support the first step in the scientific career of the young generation of statisticians. In 2023, our students were represented by Bendegúz Zaboretzky, who spoke about the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on discourses related to mental illness. The basis of the master's student's presentation was the study he prepared with his instructors as co-authors, which was published in the Taylor & Francis Online Q1 journal in the summer of 2023.

Our students can also get involved in the research conducted at the Department of Statistics, either within the framework of thesis writing, or as a research assistant during internship, or within the framework of Scientific Students’ Associations Conference work. Our research groups regularly announce such opportunities. In recent years, this has been the case with the medical meta-analysis research of our research colleague at SOTE, and the research of the ELTE Data for Good research group.

The Research Center for Computational Social Science (facebook), which is co-led by the head of the department, also regularly receives interns, here are some survey theses produced in machine text analysis topic, the PhD members of the research group who completed the Survey Statistics and data Analytics MSc are Jakab Buda, Zsófia Rakovics, Árpád Knap, Márton Rakovics and Emese Tóth.

Similarly, the department's Survey Methods Room Budapest research group also often receives interns.

Below are a few more examples of the most important student-participated research of the last decade.

Under the leadership of Ágnes Hárs and with the participation of our instructors Renáta Németh and Dávid Simon, a three-year OTKA research was started in December 2016. The title of the research: Migration – approaching the reality with innovative methods. The research is prepared and then conducted with student participation. In connection with the preparation, we also announced a thesis topic.

Our students have contributed to several previous researches of the Methodological Research Center of the Faculty of Social Sciences of ELTE, such as the Budapest research, the Budapesti Roma research, and the research on gender equality and its implementation inside and outside the university.

Programme director Renáta Németh was the supervisor of the successful thesis of our student Anna Bárdits, which was published in the 2016/1 issue of the Hungarian Statistical Review with the inclusion of our student Győző Terplán as a co-author. Title: An old problem comes to the fore again: the wrong practice of null hypothesis significance testing. In June 2016, the article was presented as a keynote at the meeting of the Statistical Subcommittee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where the authors participated as invited speakers.

The data collection of the IT needs assessment of the university was organized by Dávid Simon, the instructor of the department, and the short analysis prepared by faculty (as part of student work) were prepared by the students of the department. In addition to all of this, we have worked together with our excellent students in many projects even after their university years (numerous online, migration, bullying, and labour market researches). 

Between 2013 and 2015, the OTKA research entitled ‘Migration in health care: phenomena and explanations’ (ID.: 101067) was carried out, the methodological leader of which was Dávid Simon, instructor of the master programme. We involved several students in the research.

Every year, several students participate in the Erasmus programme for training abroad at professionally relevant and high-quality universities (e.g. Utrecht, Sheffield). In the year 2012/13, our graduate student Panka Bencsik was one of the four students whose Kellner Scholarship programme financed his two semesters of education in the United States that year.

Our students worked in the TÁMOP project taking place at the department between 2010-2012 and in the OTKA research conducted with the participation of instructor Dávid Simon. A good example of the academic success of our students is the 2013/2 special issue of the Review of Sociology focusing on quantitative methodological issues. Three of the authors are instructors of the Department of Statistics (Renáta Németh, Dávid Simon, Gábor Kende) and two students of the Survey Statistics and Data Analytics programme, Miklós Hajdu and Alexandra Luksander, are also among the authors.

In 2010 and 2011, our students participated in an international study trip as part of our research university project. In 2010, 2 students were members of the first and 2 of the third-place teams in the National Market Research Student Competition organized by Corvinus University of Budapest. In 2011, our team made it to the semi-finals, and in 2013, one of our students was a member of the 3rd place team.