The Sweaty Penguin is an award-winning comedy climate program presented by PBS’s national climate initiative Peril and Promise. Through late-night-comedy-style monologues and in-depth expert interviews, The Sweaty Penguin cuts through the doom-and-gloom of the climate conversation. Our team is a small group of motivated, creative, multi-talented students and recent graduates working remotely across the continent with a variety of skill sets, and a shared passion for making climate change less overwhelming, less politicized, and more fun.
Our Research Fellowship is an opportunity for college underclassmen to research climate issues, develop their writing and communication skills, and receive leadership opportunities in short order. Your day-to-day responsibilities will involve research and fact checking for podcast scripts, writing web columns, working on grant applications, and helping develop educational resources based on past content.
The fellowship is a part-time, paid summer opportunity beginning in mid-May. It typically takes about 3-4 months for new team members to be properly trained to write full podcast scripts themselves. As such, we offer select opportunities for anyone who successfully completes the fellowship to advance into a Researcher position on our team, where you would be writing full scripts and spearheading new projects for The Sweaty Penguin, often of your own choosing.
Benefits and pay range:
🐧 $15 per hour
🐧 Remote
🐧 5-10 hours per week
🐧 Aside from required meetings, you can set your own hours
🐧 Can be flexible with vacations, with advance planning
Responsibilities and Duties:
🐧 Research and draft outlines for The Sweaty Penguin’s deep dive podcasts
🐧 Write columns to be published on our website and licensed to Peril and Promise (you will likely receive a byline on PBS.org)
🐧 Fact check podcast scripts
🐧 Create transcriptions, YouTube chapters, and other materials for podcast episodes
🐧 Identify grant and fundraising opportunities for The Sweaty Penguin and write applications
🐧 Help develop educational resources for use in high school and college classrooms
Requirements and Qualifications:
🐧 College student in the class of 2026, or incoming college student in the class of 2027**
🐧 Exceptional writer
🐧 Past educational or extracurricular experience with climate issues
🐧 Passions for combating climate doom and finding bipartisan common ground on climate solutions
🐧 An affinity for leadership, teamwork, and taking initiative
🐧 A sense of humor (but don’t worry, our Comedy Writers handle the jokes!)
**Applicants must be 18 at the start of the fellowship.**
To apply, please fill out the form below and attach your resume. In lieu of a cover letter, we ask you to answer a few short answer questions and complete a writing prompt where you will be able to show off your writing skills, climate passion, and creativity. Besides the final writing prompt, please keep all other answers to 150 words or less. If you have any questions, please email Owen Reith at owen@thesweatypenguin.com.
Applications officially close at 11:59pm ET on Friday, April 21, 2023. However, we plan to conduct interviews and offer positions on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early!
Writing Prompt: Pick a past episode of The Sweaty Penguin and write a mock Twitter thread based on that episode. A Twitter thread is a series of connected tweets (each 280 characters or less), which many communicators use to break down a topic for a lay social media audience in a digestible, engaging manner. This thread is obviously not going on Twitter, but we do expect you to adhere to the same character constraints. Your thread must include a minimum of five tweets, and may include up to twenty, but remember — the longer the thread, the less likely Twitter users would be to read it all! Please type out your thread and upload it as a PDF.
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