Reflections on 2025 Undergraduate Placements in the CDL Lab

This Spring our lab hosted undergraduate placement students. They each brought unique skills to our team, and we thoroughly enjoyed working with them. You can read more about their experiences below: 

Reflection 1: By Tanay Mukerji – Psychology with Disruptive Technologies, DCU

Over the past few months, I’ve been lucky enough to spend my INTRA placement at the CDL Lab at UCD. As a third-year Psychology with Disruptive Technologies student at DCU, I wanted a placement that would let me apply psychology in real-world, creative ways – and this one certainly delivered!

I’ve been mainly working on the Junior Engineer Development Initiative (JEDI), a project designed to challenge engineering stereotypes and help children see that engineering is for everyone. Early on, I helped brainstorm lesson plans, shape student and teacher materials and later got to work on website content to make everything more engaging and accessible.

As the weeks progressed, I shifted into research mode – coding student worksheets from the initial phase of the project and supporting school recruitment efforts. I also helped design “assignment briefs” for a hands-on engineering activity, making sure they were fun, age-appropriate, and met the study’s research goals.

Outside of JEDI, I took part in lab meetings, journal clubs and worked alongside a team who were each in different stages of their career, whether they were PhD students, Masters students or even fellow interns. I’ve learned a lot about developmental psychology, science communication and what it’s like to work in a collaborative research environment over the last 14 weeks, and I am very grateful to have had this opportunity. 

I really enjoyed the independence and trust we were given to do our tasks – it pushed me to take initiative and grow more confident in my ideas. I’d highly recommend this placement to students as they would have the opportunity to gain hands-on experience, creative input, and the chance to see what it takes to be part of a psychological research team.

I want to thank the team for all the help, support and feedback I’ve gotten during my time here – it’s been a fantastic experience!

Reflection 2: By Conor O’Flaherty – Psychology student, DCU

My name is Conor O’Flaherty. I am a third year undergraduate student in Psychology at Dublin City University who underwent placement at the Cognition, Development and Learning Lab in University College Dublin. As a research assistant, my roles and tasks were quite varied, with involvement in many differing aspects of numerous ongoing projects. These ranged from quite exciting, such as testing participants in the SIMS project (Spatial Interference with Maths Study), to a little tedious, such as inputting data from dozens of worksheets into an excel spreadsheet. Overall, the experience gained during this time was invaluable to me, and the skills I learned here will be highly applicable both in my degree and in future job roles. I would highly recommend it for those interested in the research aspects of psychology over the clinical side, particularly if one has even an inkling of interest in cognitive or developmental psychology.