Kellogg students get a boost with College awards

Claire Duddy and Yvonne Yim have benefited from bursary awards from the Monika Tesarova Fund for 2019. Each year the College is pleased to offer bursaries of £100 made available due to the generosity of a College Fellow. The Monika Tesarova Fund Bursary exists to support a Kellogg College student wishing to invest in their studies or take up an opportunity while studying at Oxford that they would ordinarily be precluded from doing due to financial constraints.

Claire used her award to attend a course that connected her current work with her undergraduate economics studies:

I am really grateful to Kellogg and to the Monika Tesarova Fund for this bursary, which enabled me to attend a short course hosted here in Oxford on health economics and econometrics, with a focus on health policy evaluation. Attending the course allowed me to dip my toe into an important area that is outside the scope of my normal study programme (the MSc in Evidence Based Health Care (Systematic Reviews)). It was also an opportunity for me to connect my current study and research with my undergraduate study of economics (completed almost 15 years ago!) and help to bridge this gap.

The course was excellent, beginning with an overview and for me, important refresher of the key concepts and language of economics. The day’s clear focus on health policy, and measuring and assessing its impact spoke directly to my own research interests and left me thinking about potential research questions for the future. More immediately, it has left me feeling much more confident about the potential to bring literature from economics into my current research project, a realist review exploring variation in test ordering practice in primary care settings.

Yvonne was equally enthusiastic about how the bursary had helped her:

The bursary allowed me to translate my interest in foreign language learning into action – I started learning French with the Language Centre at the University. As a language acquisition researcher, first-hand experience in foreign language would be of crucial benefit. Having been using English as a second language for my tertiary study, the experience of learning a new one started to grow foreign to me. I greatly appreciate the opportunity made possible by the Monika Tesarova Fund Bursary. It is particularly rewarding when I am able to actively evaluate my own learning by drawing on theories of applied linguistics.