Ljuben Atov, COL ’26, Skopje, N. Macedonia
This summer was unique, a great learning opportunity, and lots of fun. I was a summer research fellow at the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies, where I had the opportunity to work with Prof. Alice Xu to study slum urbanization in Brazil. The PORES fellowship was great for community building and professional development. I had the chance to hear from past PORES fellows about their journey, work on an Election night simulation through NBC’s Decision Desk, and attend my first baseball game (Go Phillies!). What struck me the most was that each fellow worked on a different project, yet all of us shared the same excitement and enthusiasm about our projects. Through PORES, I was fortunate to learn about US politics, democracy, and elections research from some of the leading experts in those fields.
My research primarily focused on two broader projects. The first one was studying whether segregation had an effect on the number of projects and funds invested in slum development in Brazil. I primarily used R to conduct several regression analyses, clean messy datasets, create data visualizations, and uncover interesting patterns through the data. The second project primarily focused on analyzing Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) surveys across the last 20 years. We looked at data from around the globe to uncover patterns in climate adaptation and mitigation policies. This dataset was particularly interesting and challenging to work with due to data reporting inconsistencies and required us to come up with a clever way to standardize the data by creating a question key to be able to merge data that was reported differently across the years. I got to learn about what different countries prioritize in their climate adaptation policies, how and by how much each municipality is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, and why certain countries fall behind in terms of developing their climate adaptation policy plans.
Most importantly, my summer experience was a pivotal point for exploring my research interest and developing new interests across areas I knew very little about. My biggest highlight of the fellowship is the community I formed and am proud to be part of. The PORES fellowship was a great experience overall, and I would highly recommend it to everyone considering applying.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2025 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
