Ondrej Zika

BScEc Psychology / Marketing

Instead of spending a year in industry I wanted to get more experience in research, specifically in the field of neuroscience and neuroeconomics. So I tried to get in touch with all professors around the world who do neuroeconomics or decision neuroscience. As it is almost impossible to get paid for such work at undergraduate level, I had to get a research funding grant, which was tough, but I succeeded in the end. After months of struggle I got invited to work as research assistant and lab manager in the O'Doherty Lab at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

I conducted research in lab which focuses on human reward systems in the brain and the neurobiology of decision making. My work as research assistant spanned from general lab issues, such as maintaining the lab website, to conducting actual research. In particular, designing experiments, running neuroimaging EEG, fMRI studies and in the last half year also analysing the data. Training in neuroscience is a very long and tough process, it involves a lot of mathematics, programming and statistics skills, but over the year I got quite familiar with a lot of it. 

By participating in YES I learned a lot of skills in computational methods, mathematics, data analysis, programming, and also skills more directly relevant to neuroscience such as how to use the magnetic resonance scanner, the electroencephalogram or eye-tracker. I now have experience working in the world's top research institution and I have met a lot of people who conduct ground breaking research. This networking side of things was perhaps the most important factor for my future career.

I have gained experience of conducting independent research, and I will look to apply this experience in my final year project. Also, having a solid background in research will be an advantage when applying to graduate schools later in my final year.