Interns and students

Internships and student placements must be one month minimum duration to allow you time to get to grips with the local environment and subject material.

Both Students and Interns are involved in specific research projects, with the expectation that they will produce a short report on their project at the end of their stay. Interns have a higher volunteer component.

Environment and Conservation Internships with AUSTROP will be beneficial to university students studying Environmental Management, Marine and Coastal Management, Botany, Biology and the like, as they provide practical field experience in the Australian Tropical Environment.

Interns may be working with visiting scientists, or they may be working by themselves under the supervision of the Director. The research projects may be new, or they may be projects on which previous interns or researchers have been working. Once again, project possibilities are very wide ranging, but the realities of the local environment and demands at the station may present certain limitations. We will work with you on identifying feasible projects and research designs at the time that you contact us with a proposal. Flexibility is key, and conditions can change in less than a moments notice here in the Daintree tropics. It does help if you had an idea of a research area!

It is difficult to determine specifics of research projects in advance - weather and the Director's workload (he’s the go-to and fixit man!), so it is better if your project relates to something we are doing at the time.

Vaccinations 
As we have a colony of spectacled flying foxes - which are our educational animals, it is a requirement for volunteers, interns, students and researchers to have a current rabies vaccination. They are a long-captive colony and are clean – but we are obliged to require anyone who wants to work on bats (any bats), or interact with them, to be immunised. It is highly unlikely that you would contract Australian Bat Lyssavirus (a form of rabies, and an extremely rare disease) from contact with them, however it’s better to be safe than sorry (and it’s the law)!

If you are not vaccinated – you won’t be allowed near the bats, which would be a shame. Besides, if you are travelling, especially in Asia, vaccination against rabies is considered wise.