Overseas Institution Visit Report: Valeria Burdea

Nottingham DTC student Valeria Burdea, reporting back after her ESRC-funded Overseas Institution Visit to the University of Amsterdam

I visited the CREED lab at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) which took place in March 2017.

One of the activities I engaged with during this visit was attending CREED senior and lunch seminars. As a result of discussing with fellow students at those events I now have a clearer idea regarding the difficulties of implementing a voting environment in the lab.

I attended a senior seminar given by Heather Royer from UC Santa Barbara. She presented a paper entitled “When Incentives Backfire: Spillover Effects in Food Choice”. Since it is not very often for researchers in my field to run field experiments due to the cost and inability to control for many confounding factors, I consider the opportunity of attending her talk useful for my future plans of potentially running a field experiment.

Other events I took part in enabled me to:

• Understand alternative research methods used in my field
• Familiarise myself with the wider research environment
• Consider in more detail my career prospects beyond the PhD, and how to be competitive in the jobs market
• Develop my own presentation skills
• Gain confidence in my own project owing to positive feedback from the cohort
• Build a network of likeminded scholars, share ideas for experimental design and recommendations for resources
• Build two new collaborative research projects which will have a great positive contribution to my competitiveness on the job market.

In conclusion, this month as a visiting student at the CREED department of UvA has proven to be extremely productive, both from a short-term perspective and from a long-term one. From the short-term view, it has helped me define more clearly a new and interesting research direction for my third thesis chapter. From the long-term view, it has helped me build a strong academic collaborative network which is essential for finding a good job opportunity after finishing my PhD.

Valeria Burdea