A career-building opportunity to delve into real issues

A paid research internship program, ARIA, helps McGill Arts undergrads explore pathways to careers and future studies The post A career-building opportunity to delve into real issues appeared first on McGill Reporter .

(Left to right): Salma Galal, Olivier Lesage Filippin and Magnolia Miller Even in the final years of an undergraduate degree, it can be hard to understand how to turn what excites you into a meaningful career. For students like Magnolia Miller, Olivier Lesage Filippin and Salma Galal, the answer is becoming clearer thanks to opportunities like the Arts Undergraduate Internship Research Awards (ARIA). The $5,000 awards allow them to pursue research projects in the summer with McGill professors.

While the program is competitive, about 40 to 60 per cent of applications are successful and 30 projects move forward each year. Carving a path in health care Magnolia Miller (BA’27, International Development & Economics), who came to McGill from rural Ontario with little knowledge of French, is taking on an ambitious project focusing on Quebec’s health care system. “I’ve always been interested in health care and health care systems.

I thought the best way to contribute was becoming a doctor, but I learned here that there are lots of different ways to help,” she said. While taking a course in health economics with Professor Erin Strumpf, Miller visited regularly during office hours to discuss course content and, hearing about a research project that aligns with her interests, asked to work with her. “ Dr. Strumpf is working with the interuniversity research centre, CIRANO, and Quebec’s Commissaire à

la santé et au bien-être on the challenge of financial sustainability in Quebec’s health care system ,” Miller explained, “so this project is going to investigate potential interventions.” The two co-designed Miller’s portion of the research project and after a successful application to ARIA, she started gathering literature to prepare a report of recommendations. “When I came here, I could barely order coffee in French, and now I’m summarizing policy documents from the Quebec government and presenting findings in French, which is really satisfying.”

Miller said she hopes to continue this research into her master’s studies and may even apply to work at one of Quebec’s provincial research bodies. “The professors here helped me realize there are opportunities, not just for research and funding, but even types of jobs I didn’t know existed,” she explained. Politics from the ground up For Olivier Lesage Filippin (BA’27, Honours Political Science), ARIA was an opportunity to pursue research in an area he first became curious about at Cégep Drummond, in Drummondville.

“You’ll see a lot of media outlets rightfully talking about democratic backsliding in the United States, but we see those dynamics have happened years prior in Central and Eastern Europe,” he explains. The paper he’s working on with Maria Popova of McGill’s Political Science Department and the University of Gothenburg is a cross-country analysis exploring how mayors have worked against waves of populism and autocratization at the national level. “Local politics has been a footnote for some time now,” he said.

“It’s a fantastic way of proving the usefulness of bottom-up political mobilization.” So far, Lesage Filippin has been annotating articles for discussion , refining hypotheses, and evaluating pre-existing surveys and quantitative datasets. Working closely with a mentor on a research project has been eye-opening, he explained.

“ With class papers you might revise ideas, but you generally stay with the same direction ,” he said. “ Because the research process here has been more rigorous and open-minded, we moved far from our initial expectations. ” Your brain on poetry Salma Galal (BA’27, English and Psychology) was lucky enough to find a research project at the intersection of her two fields, literature and psychology, with her professor Miranda Hickman.

“We are essentially looking at what your brain does when you read poetry and prose, a state called aesthetic attention,” she explained. “Neuroaesthetics is a newer field, and it’s exciting to work on something that feels really important to society.” Galal expressed concern about an upswing in hyperattention, which occurs when scrolling social media, for example.

“A lot of people say the decay of deep attention is why propaganda is so rampant right now, especially in my country. I think the idea of attention links back to the ability to think critically and deeply,” the Californian said. Beyond contributing to a study that feels meaningful, Galal said she appreciates learning how dynamic academic research can be.

“I just feel really lucky this program exists,” she said. “It’s showing me a more explicit path for the future – that even if I go into academia, I’m not limiting myself to one stream and I can still contribute to interdisciplinary research.” The students shared similar advice for undergraduates who are interested in research: Follow your curiosity, build relationships with your professors – and ask to work with them.

Learn more about the ARIA internships , or start exploring programs at McGill. The post A career-building opportunity to delve into real issues appeared first on McGill Reporter .