Honors students are required to complete three credit hours of an independent study, research assistantship, or research-based internship of their choosing, under a faculty sponsor. It must involve criminological or criminal justice research. This means that it must involve empirical data (quantitative or qualitative) on crime or related behaviors, or on the criminal justice system. Research activities may include collecting data, building a dataset, analyzing it, or any combination of these. For this, students must register for CCJS389H Independent Research. This course can be completed during the spring semester of the junior year or anytime in the senior year.

If a student has an Honors RA position with a CCJS faculty member, they complete this linked form. The student should submit this form to the Honors Director(s) and if approved, send it to CCJS Advising for processing and permission to register for the credit.

If a student has a research-related internship or research assistantship outside of CCJS, they complete this linked form. The student should submit this form to the Honors Director(s) and if approved, send it to CCJS Advising for processing and permission to register for the credit.

NO, There's flexibility. The required three hours of research assistantship or research-related internship can be split up as follows: one hour for three semesters, three hours for one semester, or two hours for one semester and the remaining hour in another semester.

If a student finds a research project or assistantship with a CCJS faculty member, the faculty member will be considered their sponsor. Faculty sponsors must be approved by the Honors program director. If a student finds a research internship external to the department, their supervisor at that internship will be considered their sponsor for the honors program. All external sponsors must also be approved by the program director.

YES, students can study abroad in the spring of their third year (first honors program year) and do their internship/independent study hours another semester.

Honors students will be made aware of known available research positions on various CCJS faculty projects as they come up.

Students are encouraged to read about the CCJS faculty on the department website and reach out to those who are engaged in research the student is interested in. However, faculty members may vary in their ability to take on a student in a particular semester.

Link to a Google Drive with current CCJS opportunities: opportunities - Google Drive

Honors students will receive access to this drive once accepted into the program.

Students are encouraged to reach out to the CCJS Advising Career Outreach Specialist Shannon Sibel (ssibel [at] umd.edu) for guidance in finding opportunities that may qualify for the honors program requirement. To schedule an appointment, use TerpEngage. The CCJS Advising office also sends out weekly newsletters with information about jobs and internships; students are encouraged to read these carefully if they are looking for opportunities.

Internship opportunities and resources made known to the honors directors will also be sent out to students and/or posted on course webpages as they become available.

Internship approval is on a case-by-case basis.

See the CCJS blog for research internship examples and below for potential examples of opportunities.

University of Maryland

• Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS)
  • 2023 internship not open yet
• BSOS Summer Research Initiative (SRI) 
• Center for the Study of Business Ethics, Regulation & Crime (C-BERC) Fellows Program
• Center for Substance Use, Addiction & Health Research (CESAR) 
• National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START)
• Social and Moral Development Laboratory

National Science Foundation REU sites (summer terms only)

• Texas A&M University
  • NSF REU Site: Research Institute in Sociology and Social Inequality
  • Research Topics/Keywords: Health disparities, Residential segregation, Education disparities, Disparities in housing and neighborhoods, Disparities in criminal justice outcomes
• University of Arkansas at Little Rock
  • The Scope and Consequences of Hate Crime Victimization in the South School of Criminal Justice and Criminology
  • Research Topics/Keywords: Hate crime; victimization; qualitative research; survey research; criminal justice; criminology
• University of North Carolina at Charlotte
  • REU Site: Data Science and Crime Analytics
  • Research Topics/Keywords: Data Science and Crime Analytics
• University of South Carolina at Columbia
  • Disparities in the Criminal Justice System
  • Research Topics/Keywords: Criminology, Criminal Justice, System Disparities
• Wayne State University
  • REU Site: Communities, Crime, & Criminal Justice in Detroit (C3JD) Criminology & Criminal Justice
  • Research Topics/Keywords: Criminology, Criminal Justice, Communities, Crime

Non-Profit Organizations

• American Civil Liberties Union
• American Institutes for Research
• Brennan Center for Justice
• The Center for Naval Analyses (CNA)
• Council for Court Excellence
• Council on Criminal Justice
• Crime and Justice Institute / Community Resources for Justice
• FreeState Justice
• Death Penalty Information Center
• Institute for Defense Analyses Summer Associate Internships
• Justice Policy Institute
• National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
• National Center for Victims of Crime
• National Criminal Justice Association
• National Policing Institute
• Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
• Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network research internship
• The Sentencing Project 
• The Urban Institute
• Vera Institute of Justice
• Wilson Center

Government Agencies

• Census Bureau - Economic Reimbursable Surveys Division
  • Description of Fall 2022 internship on the CCJS blog
• Governor's Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim Services
  • Description of Spring 2023 internship on the CCJS blog
• US Naval Research Laboratory
• Research & Analysis Internship with the Maryland Judiciary
  • Summer 2024 opportunity posted here under Job ID 11053

Other Opportunities

• Amtrak Crime Statistics internship
  • Summer 2024 application open
• ICF, International

Students should check with the honors director(s) for approval of their specific internship to ensure the fulfillment of the research requirement.

YES, students can be paid for an internship while earning credit simultaneously.  It's not common, but if a student can find a paid internship, that's great!

See here for information on finding funding to support unpaid internships: Financing Your Internship | University Career Center & The President's Promise (umd.edu)

MAYBE; the project should involve empirical data. This may include collecting data, building a dataset, and/or analyzing it somehow (even if only in a descriptive way). For instance, one student worked in an internship with a lawyer and ended up collecting data on white collar crime cases involving women. That ended up motivating her thesis research examining gender disparities in sentences of white-collar crime cases.

The honors director(s) need to know as much as possible about the specifics of the internship. It needs to be research related and give a student the opportunity to be involved in the research process, using data to answer a research question.