‘This Internship is a Great Start to an Academic Career’

This year, Angelina Yudina graduated from the Bachelor’s in Business Informatics at HSE University and enrolled in the Master’s in Economics and Economic Policy. She has also worked as a research assistant at the International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis since May 2021. In her interview, Angelina spoke about her role and responsibilities as a research intern, the personal and professional skills she has developed, and her plans for the future.

© HSE University

This year, Angelina Yudina graduated from the Bachelor’s in Business Informatics at HSE University and enrolled in the Master’s in Economics and Economic Policy. She has also worked as a research assistant at the International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis since May 2021. In her interview, Angelina spoke about her role and responsibilities as a research intern, the personal and professional skills she has developed, and her plans for the future.

Angelina Yudina

The Internship

In my second year, Andrey Subochev, my academic supervisor and Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis (DeCAn), invited me to the centre. I had already received an offer from another laboratory, but I chose DeCAn because, first of all, it was an excellent match for my research interests, and secondly, I wanted to continue working on the topic I started when preparing my term paper.

At first, the research internship primarily took place remotely. I received assignments by email or in person, then worked on them when I was not studying.

During the internship, I solved theoretical and practical tasks in the field of social choice theory, presented reports at research conferences and seminars, and also worked on an article.

Research

I researched concepts for solving the problem of optimal choice based on incomplete and contradictory results of pairwise comparison of alternatives (tournament solutions). More specifically, I investigated the properties of various versions of tournament solutions, such as bipartisan set and minimal covering set, as well as their set-theoretic relations with other tournament solutions. I also implemented effective algorithms for calculating tournament solutions in Python. The program I created made it possible not only to find examples and counterexamples for theorems, but also to solve practical tasks, such as aggregating the ratings of journals based on various bibliometric indicators.

My most frequent point of contact was my academic supervisor, Andrey Subochev. He set tasks and monitored their progress.

It was easy to start working, as I was already familiar with both the topic and the academic supervisor. I don’t remember there being any difficulties, except those related to working on the tasks. Some assertions were proved easily, while others remain elusive.

New Knowledge and Skills

This internship is a great start to an academic career. I had the opportunity not only to work with wonderful scientists and gain invaluable knowledge and experience from them, but also to try my hand at research and make sure that I had chosen the right field of research interests.

I am certain that the knowledge and skills I gained during the internship will be useful to me both in my future research activities and in my master’s programme.

I also improved my knowledge of English and my so-called soft skills. In addition, the need to combine studies and work helped me to strengthen my time-management skills.

Plans for the Future

Right now, I simply cannot wait to start my master’s programme. The field is somewhat new to me, which spurs my interest to study it. In terms of work, my plans are to finish writing an article and publish it.

The International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis is actively seeking international students for research internships. If you would like to find out more and submit an application, please see here.