AEI internships provide students with an opportunity to learn from some of America’s most renowned scholars, economists, political scientists, and foreign policy specialists conducting research on today’s prominent public policy questions. The Institute provides an intellectually stimulating environment, rich with critical thinking, scholarship, and lively debate.
AEI internships are available in the Fall, Spring, and Summer to experienced undergraduate students, graduate students, and recent graduates. A minimum 3.0 GPA is required; however, most successful candidates have at least a 3.5 GPA.
Due to the volume of applications, only candidates selected to move forward in the interview process will be contacted.
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The Critical Threats Project (CTP), led by Senior Fellow Frederick W. Kagan, tracks and analyzes current and emerging challenges to American national security in concert with its partner organization the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Interns will support analysis of the ongoing Israel-Hamas War, Iran’s Axis of Resistance, and Iranian regional activities and domestic politics. Interns will be responsible for monitoring regional media, translating, assisting with and conducting research, orally briefing analysis, and contributing to CTP's daily Iran Update. The internship includes educational modules for developing intelligence analysis tradecraft.
The American Enterprise Institute seeks an intern who will assist Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy. Dr. Eberstadt focuses on global demographic trends, human capital, and economic development, with a current emphasis on China, Russia, and developing nations. He also researches North Korea, poverty in the United States, foreign aid, global health, and mortality. The intern will do quantitative analysis, background research, fact-checking, and editing for articles and ongoing projects. Experience with Python, R, or Stata and familiarity with Microsoft Excel are required. Professional working capacity in Mandarin is preferred. Candidates who...
The American Enterprise Institute seeks an intern who will assist Distinguished Senior Fellow Danielle Pletka and Senior Fellow Marc A. Thiessen in research tasks for regular opinion columns, long-term projects, and events. Typical research will relate to the Middle East, China, America’s role in the international community, and occasionally domestic politics.
The intern will assist with research for the What the Hell Is Going On? podcast. The intern will also provide research and communications support for Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies Kori Schake on...
The education policy team’s data intern will support the team’s cutting-edge research at the intersection of data, education policy, and technology. The data intern will research a variety of topics, including by:
• analyzing and drawing meaningful interpretations from state and national education data sets;
• using statistical modeling to estimate causal effects;
• using web scraping to construct novel education data sets;
• applying text analysis, machine learning, and other techniques to analyze unstructured data; and
• creating visualizations and written reports to communicate results.
Intern in the press office of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a distinguished Washington, DC, think tank. Learn about strategic media communication, track our scholars’ research, and familiarize yourself with the media landscape.
AEI is a great place to learn about the interaction between government and media. Join a select intern program that offers unique learning experiences such as exposure to research in foreign policy, politics, economics, technology, and education; instruction...
The Editing Services department at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is responsible for editing and coordinating publications, event materials, and other projects and assisting with the promotion of scholars’ work. An intern in this department will assist team members with copyediting and proofreading, coordinating AEI book promotion, maintaining archives, and completing other communication-related tasks. Candidates should have excellent editing and writing skills, strong attention to detail, knowledge about media and current events, great organizational skills, and an interest in communications and marketing. Experience working with publications and with editorial style guides (especially...
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) seeks a communications and marketing systems intern to assist with promoting AEI’s research to its constituents. This includes using our automated email marketing system to prepare and send articles and newsletters, using our customer-relationship management database to gather appropriate mailing lists, researching and updating constituent contact information, and helping with other special projects. While some data entry is required, the intern will also work on broader projects such as facilitating marketing automation, curating email content, and analyzing and improving the effectiveness of AEI’s email communications to its...
Founded by AEI scholar Ian Rowe, the FREE Initiative champions the vital roles of family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship in equipping the rising generation of young Americans. FREE’s mission is to help young people recognize and exercise their personal agency through these four institutions. Key priorities include building a network of leaders committed to fostering agency in their communities, launching a high school curriculum focused on youth agency, and expanding partnerships through outreach and events.
The American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility (COSM) seeks two driven, research-oriented interns for spring 2026. The interns will work closely with COSM scholars and staff to research, identify, and promote policies that improve opportunity and mobility for low-income Americans. COSM scholars study the determinants of economic mobility and human flourishing in America through empirically driven and policy-informing research.
The COSM interns will...
The American Enterprise Institute’s education policy team seeks a data intern who will support cutting-edge research at the intersection of data, education policy, and technology. The intern will research a variety of topics, including by
- Analyzing and drawing meaningful interpretations from state and national education datasets;
- Using statistical modeling to estimate causal effects;
- Using web scraping to construct novel education...
The American Enterprise Institute seeks an intern for the AEIdeas blog. The intern will have two primary responsibilities: (1) Assist with administrative maintenance of AEIdeas, such as by editing, formatting posts, and searching for applicable media (photos, videos, charts, etc.), and (2) assist with editing- and research-related tasks for Senior Fellow James Pethokoukis’s various writing projects and podcast interviews. The latter task may include collecting policy information from journalistic and academic sources, preparing for Political Economy podcast interviews, and providing editorial assistance for Faster, Please!, Mr. Pethokoukis’s...
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) seeks an in-person intern to provide research and administrative support to the Economic Policy Studies department. The economic policy intern will have the opportunity to do quantitative analysis, background research, fact-checking, and editing for articles and ongoing academic research projects on issues related to applied economics and public finance. The intern will also assist with live, in-person AEI events on timely public policy issues.
The ideal...
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Events team ensures that the more than 1,200 public and private events held annually at AEI’s headquarters are executed flawlessly. AEI scholars and staff turn to the Events team to maximize the quality of all aspects of events, including setup, audience attendance, audiovisual production, catering, registration, metrics, and billing. As the Events intern, you’ll play a crucial role in supporting AEI’s mission to foster insightful dialogue and executing impactful events that shape the future of public policy.
The office of the president at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) seeks an intern for the coming semester. Robert Doar, AEI’s president, is a former social service administrator whose primary scholarly interest is poverty. He is an active and respected participant in the ongoing national debate about social spending and welfare reform.
Mr. Doar and his staff support the work of AEI’s scholars and promote the Institute’s fundamental values of limited government, economic...
The American Enterprise Institute seeks an intern who will assist Senior Fellow Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life. Dr. Cox is an expert on polling and public opinion and specializes in survey research, politics, generational change and identity, and religion. The intern will have the opportunity to work on a range of public opinion projects and gain exposure to various survey analysis techniques and polling methodologies, with an emphasis on studying the growing gender divide in public opinion among young people for a forthcoming book by Dr. Cox.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) seeks an intern who will assist Senior Fellow Kevin R. Kosar and other scholars in AEI’s Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department. Dr. Kosar researches the US Congress and election reform, focusing on how electoral systems affect Congress as an institution.
The intern will assist with Dr. Kosar’s work on Congress and elections by reading and analyzing scholarly research; collecting, cleaning, and analyzing data on Congress...
The American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center seeks an intern to support the research of Senior Fellows Edward J. Pinto and Tobias Peter on domestic housing, historical and current mortgage lending policies, and financial policy reform.
Primary assignments will include helping maintain the center’s various indexes and large databases; supporting research through data management, retrieval, and analysis; editing and contributing to scholarly papers, articles, and op-eds; creating...
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) seeks an in-person intern for its technology policy studies program, which focuses on advancing policies to encourage innovation, competition, and growth in technology and seeks to minimize unintended consequences amid the rise of disruptive technology, such as artificial intelligence. The intern will assist AEI’s technology policy team with the program’s daily research and administrative activities and the tech policy newsletter.
The...
The American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Technology, Science, and Energy (CTSE) seeks a driven, research-oriented intern who will work closely with Senior Fellow M. Anthony Mills and CTSE staff to research the relationship between the federal government and the scientific research establishment, the role of expertise in democracy, and the history and impact of federal science policy. Intern duties will include conducting literature reviews, retrieving and analyzing data, editing and drafting materials, discussing research ideas, organizing and assisting with the execution of conferences and seminars, and providing background research for reports and scholarly...
The American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility seeks a driven, research-oriented intern for its workforce development team. The vocation, career, and work intern will work closely with Senior Fellow Brent Orrell and staff to research the intersectional domain of workforce development policy.
Current projects include analyzing the present and future of work, economic trends in response to artificial intelligence, the skills needed for...