When Churchill student Sofiia Shypovych arrived at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab last summer, she knew she was in for a challenge. What she didn’t expect was how transformative the experience would be. The Churchill College student from Ukraine, studying Psychological and Behavioural Sciences, spent eight weeks working on cutting-edge research into social media behaviour, made possible through the College’s Summer Opportunities Bursary programme.
As an Undergraduate Research Assistant supervised by Churchill Fellow Prof. Sander van der Linden, Dr Jon Roozenbeek and Yara Kyrychenko, Sofiia engaged with two important research projects. The work provided her with practical experience in academic writing, ethical research procedures, and experimental design that will prove invaluable for her future career in psychological sciences.
For the first project, Sofiia collaborated with researchers and students from MIT, exploring the powerful forces that shape our online behaviour. She wrote sections of a research article investigating how ingroup solidarity and outgroup hostility influence what content catches our attention on social media. Sofiia also learned to code text, images, and combinations of both, training a large language model to recognise these psychological patterns in online content.
“I was able to get hands-on experience conducting qualitative research as well as writing an academic article, which are crucial skills for any academic,” she says.
The second project took her research in a new direction, comparing how American and Ukrainian users engage with different types of social media content. For this work, Sofiia helped create research materials including surveys and 100 experimental stimuli combining images and text. She also drafted key sections of the ethics application, including the literature review, rationale, and risk assessment. She prepared all the participant-facing documents too, making sure everything met the university’s ethical standards for research involving human participants.
This ethics work gave Sofiia valuable insight into the careful considerations researchers must make when designing studies. She also gained direct experience in designing behavioural tasks and managing data collection procedures, skills that are already helping with her Part II thesis project. The experience has strengthened her postgraduate applications and given her real confidence in her research abilities. But without the bursary support provided by the College, none of this would have happened.
“Funding of this kind is essential because it opens doors to opportunities that students would not otherwise be able to access,” Sofiia explains. “For students who do not have the financial freedom to take on unpaid work, bursaries make it possible to say ‘yes’ to experiences that meaningfully shape their academic and professional future.”
The bursary freed Sofiia from the pressure of finding paid summer work, allowing her to immerse herself completely in developing her research skills. She sees this support as fundamental to fairness at Churchill, ensuring that students from all backgrounds have equal access to transformative opportunities, regardless of their financial circumstances.
The benefits extend beyond individual students too. When Churchill supports students to pursue internships, they return with enhanced skills, new perspectives, and deeper engagement with the College community.
The Summer Opportunities Bursary Fund
This was the fourth year that Churchill College offered a number of ‘Summer Opportunities Bursaries’ to support Churchill undergraduates pursuing a summer project outside of their academic course. These sought-after bursaries cover a period of up to 8 weeks, during which bursary holders are also entitled to subsidised College Accommodation.
The scheme, which was first conceived and launched by the College’s Senior Tutor Dr Rita Monson, is open to any Churchill College undergraduate student who is not a finalist. Project ideas can span any area of interest, from working in a historical archive or exploring an artist’s catalogue to developing robotics in an engineering lab or working on comparative bioinformatics in a research group. The only requirements are projects must be unconnected to the applicant’s academic course, no other funding source should be available and students must be supported by an appropriate supervisor throughout the project.
