Student Administration

The form to request to change subject can be downloaded from the link below. This form should be completed when requesting a change of Tripos.  The completed form should be returned to the Tutorial Office.

The deadline for completion and return of applications is the end of July for changes requested for the next academic year.

This form should be completed when requesting a change into Management Studies. This form should be completed when requesting a change of Tripos.  The completed form should be returned to the Tutorial Office by Wednesday 29th April at the very latest.

Restricted subjects

The Management Studies Course is a one-year course that can be taken only by students who have already completed two, or in some cases three, years of another Tripos at the University of Cambridge. It is not possible to take the Management Studies Tripos immediately on entry to Cambridge (i.e., in your first year), nor is it possible to transfer to the programme from any other institution, either in the UK or elsewhere.

The Management Studies Tripos is taken in the final year of undergraduate study; it can only be taken as the third or fourth year of a BA. It is not possible to graduate and then apply for this course.

The Management Studies Tripos is selective and not all who apply are accepted.

Potential applicants should consult the Director of Studies in Management before lodging an application to change subject to the Management Studies Tripos. Applications are made through the Tutorial Office – you must submit your fully completed form by Wednesday 29th April, in the penultimate year of your course.

Offers are normally made by the Judge Business School in June. However, you should be aware that decisions on applicants who have obtained a 2.1 or lower classification in the first and/or second year of the Tripos will be delayed until after the publication of examination results and breakdowns. This is also the case for applicants currently in their second year.

Students who apply in their third year and who would normally expect to graduate at the end of the current academic year should be aware that, due to the timing of the offers from the Judge Business School, it is likely that unsuccessful applicants will not be able to graduate in the General Admission Congregation in the current academic year. (This is because it will be too late to register once you receive your decision and you cannot apply after graduating.)

Further information is available from the Judge Business School website.

• Supervisor: Dr Chris Smith
• Duration: 8 weeks
• Period: flexible dates
• Hours: flexible

Summary:

Our team makes radio programmes, podcasts and web-based content about science, technology and medicine for consumption by the general public internationally. Our flagship Naked Scientists Podcast is one of the world’s most downloaded science shows, and, as a group, we have a long and proud history of helping people who are early on in their careers to gain a toe-hold in the world of media and learn powerful skills in science communication and outreach.

This is an opportunity to take up an exciting role as a radio and podcast producer and presenter in the Naked Scientists team. From day 1 you will learn, hands-on how to research science news stories, identify and book suitable guest contributors, conduct, record and edit interviews, and compile programmes for broadcast. You will also be guided in science writing and publishing, and will learn the key principles of quality and responsible journalism. You will leave us with a significant portfolio of published and broadcast content, which will provide an important stepping stone into future careers in this space and related disciplines.

• Supervisor: Dr Jasmin Jahic
• Duration: 8 weeks
• Period: July
• Hours: 35

Summary:

Artificial intelligence is changing software development life cycle (SDLC). However, this is easier said than to adopt in reality because SDLC is a very complex process. Research articles can only address part of the SDLC, its actions and challenges. There is a need to have an overview of all advancements in AI adoption for SDLC to help companies and researchers to reuse these results.

This project aims to build an application for collecting these articles. It relies on state-of-the-art research results considering SDLC actions, challenges, and their sources of complexity. It also considers AI strengths and limitations, beneficial outcomes and potential drawbacks. Besides the interface to users that will be able to find relevant research results and interface to authors to add those results, it will also contain certain AI-powered capabilities. The idea is to automate collection of these articles using AI agents. The applicant will build a database and a website application for managing knowledge base of papers and results of using AI in software development life cycle. Preferable technologies are Node.JS, React, JavaScript, and MySQL. You will also work with AI agents, configure and fine-tune them. You will create automation flows that scan common sources of research data and add them automatically to the database. Finally, you will design a module that enables agents to automatically contact authors of the articles and ask them for a permission of including their papers in the system.

The applicant will work together with the supervisor on software architecture for the project. We will work in Agile sprints, using test-driven development. We will heavily rely on the use of GenAI tools for test generation.
You will do the development of the application and engage in discussions regarding the conceptual design of the platform. There will be a lot of freedom to explore and experiment with various AI agents and their deployment in cloud.

• Supervisor: Dr Sebastian Graves
• Duration: 8 weeks
• Period: Flexible dates
• Hours: Flexible

Summary:

In this project I aim to study how a worker’s savings and financial position affect their chances of leaving a job, and whether they leave voluntarily (quitting) or involuntarily (being laid off). Economic theory predicts that workers with more savings can afford to quit bad jobs and search for better ones, while workers with little savings get stuck in precarious jobs where they face higher layoff risk. Surprisingly, nobody has directly tested this prediction using data that distinguishes quits from layoffs — the existing evidence is mostly about overall job loss rates or is driven by theoretical models rather than direct measurement. I will use two large household surveys — Understanding Society in the UK and the Survey of Income and Program Participation in the US — both of which record why people left their jobs and how much wealth they hold. The goal is to produce the first clean evidence on whether quit and layoff probabilities move in opposite directions across the wealth distribution, and to compare these patterns across the two countries.

The applicant will build the analysis datasets from the raw survey microdata, which involves extracting and cleaning the relevant variables from each survey, matching wealth data to employment records, and constructing a panel tracking individuals over time. They will then run statistical models estimating how the probability of quitting and the probability of being laid off vary with wealth, earnings, and other worker characteristics like age, education, and occupation. The work requires comfort with a statistical programming language (ideally STATA), patience with large and sometimes messy survey data, and willingness to dig into technical documentation to understand how variables are defined and where data quality issues arise.

• Supervisor: Dr Tim Eggington
• Duration: 6 weeks
• Period: Flexible
• Hours: Flexible

Summary:

Following his recent death, the Queens’ College acquired the papers of the highly respected filmmaker, Kevin Billington (1934-21). After graduating from Queens’ in 1957, Billington enjoyed an impressive career as a film, TV and Theatre Director, whose work reached a wide audience in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. He was at his most creative as a director of television drama in numerous acclaimed productions that include Henry VIII (1979) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1984). Films included The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970) and adaptations of Ford Madox Ford’s celebrated novel, The Good Soldier (1981), and Richard Harris’s stage comedy about a village cricket match that spirals out of control, Outside Edge (1982). The archive comprises a huge range of materials that document collaborations with Peter Cook, Kirk Douglas, Anthony Hopkins and many other well-known names. Archive materials include annotated scripts, correspondence, production notes, personal papers, DVDs of his works, and much else. Through this project we hope to gain new perspectives on the life of Billington as a British filmmaker, and examine his work as represented in the unpublished material in the archive. We also intend to organise, conserve and catalogue the collection onto the university’s ArchiveSearch catalogue so that it is fully searchable for students and researchers. This is the first of several humanities-related projects which we plan to initiate over the coming years as a means to make Queens’ Archive collections known and available for use.

The applicant’s main tasks would be:

1. organise the collection and catalogue it onto the university’s ArchiveSearch catalogue;
2. conduct in-depth research on the sources as a means to provide an extended written overview of Billington and the archive to be made available via the Queens’ Old Library Blog.

The project may also involve some photography, digitisation and conservation work. Detailed, daily training and assistance would be provided as needed throughout. No prior knowledge or experience is required other than a general interest in the subject area.

• Supervisor: Dr Andrew Zurcher
• Duration: 6-8 weeks
• Period: Flexible
• Hours: 20-30 per week

Summary:

I am currently undertaking the revision and expansion of our internationally respected online course in early modern handwriting, English Handwriting: An Online Course (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc). This teaching tool offers students a graded introduction to the reading of early modern secretary hand, a cursive script in which most state and private papers before 1640 were written, and which, especially when written fast and with the idiosyncrasies incident to regular, copious correspondence, is generally impenetrable to modern readers without training. Manuscript materials for the original course, first published online over 20 years ago, were secured from a range of local libraries, including Queens’. It is now necessary to return to our partners to obtain new and many more photographs, at a considerably higher resolution, and to generate new transcriptions and teaching materials. The site will also be expanded to include various legal hands, Latin hands, and a focus on women’s writing. The bulk of this work will be done over the summer of 2026.

Working in collaboration with me, the student researcher will help to design the new site, identify and obtain digital facsimiles from partner libraries, transcribe new materials, and ready both images and texts for online publication. The internship will begin with a week’s training in reading secretary hand, and will require regular transcription over the remaining three to four weeks. The applicant will also need to visit local libraries and archives, liaising with librarians and archivists, and will take the lead in organising the growing database of manuscript images, metadata, and transcriptions. The role will also require a considerable creative element, as we plan and develop a full range of supplementary teaching resources, and design an interface to accommodate them. The manuscripts from which the images will be taken are very diverse – state papers, household records, literary and philosophical sources, theological collections and sermon notes, inventories and book lists, and more. The role would suit a student of English or History with an interest in early modern manuscript sources of these kinds, or in early modern manuscript history.

• Supervisor: Professor Ioanna Sitaridou
• Duration: 4 weeks
• Period: Flexible
• Hours: Flexible

Summary:

Applicant will be involved in various projects ranging from impact case studies and handout development, to original research connected to my four field sites: Turkey, Sri Lanka, Gibraltar, Greece.

Tasks involve handout editing (compilation and design); impact-related drafting and admin; genuine research such as review of literature. You will have exposure and involvement in the full range of linguistics activities.

• Supervisor: Dr Peter McMurray
• Duration: 6-8 weeks
• Period: Flexible
• Hours: Flexible

Summary:

This project, tentatively titled ‘Disquiet: Auditory Histories of the Late Ottoman Empire’, is an exploration of different forms of aural culture in the eastern Mediterranean c. 1789-1922. Some aspects are rather broad ones of cultural history, such as: what kinds of listening practices can be observed across the Ottoman lands? But I am also particularly interested in less obvious forms of sonic experience, including environmental sound and auditory geological phenomena, especially earthquakes, which have always been a widespread–and tragic–dimension of life in the eastern Mediterranean. Attending to sound in these ecological contexts attunes us both to more-than-human forms of aural culture, as well as the affective depths of human experiences, whether in the context of pastoral soundscapes among animal herders or the more aggrieved sonic responses to seismic activity.

The applicant would be involved in 2-3 distinct activities, depending on the pace of work in the summer. The first would be working with Nicholas Ambraseys’ massive compendium of earthquakes in the eastern Mediterranean, looking for historical documentation of seismic aurality. The second would be assisting with the process of an edited volume focused on the general topic, especially with copyediting for authors for whom English may not be their first language, as well as with the broader process of moving a series of essays toward publication. And finally, if time permits, the applicant would be reading through travel narratives from the period. All of this work can be done in English, however knowledge of any other relevant languages (Turkish, French, Greek or Arabic, for the geological sources; and French, German or Italian for the travel narratives) would be a welcome addition. Similarly, there is no requirement for knowledge of music (whether from the region or otherwise), though interests in music will also be most welcome.

• Supervisor: Dr Lorren Eldridge
• Duration: 4-6 weeks
• Period: Flexible
• Hours: Flexible

Summary:

I am currently in the early stages of working on a book on early women legal historians in academic posts in the USA and UK. The papers of Helen Cam are held at Girton and Churchill’s archives. Helen Cam was a significant legal historian and medievalist, and one of the earlier generation of women in full time academic posts. There are also some papers relating to Mary Bateson held in the UL, although these are a bit more scattered across different collections. Mary Bateson was a less high-profile, but similarly significant individual from the same period. I am trying to not just describe details of their biographical and intellectual lives but also to consider less well known women who they worked with, taught, or corresponded with so we can explore their work, too.

The Girton archive for Cam contains 54 boxes of material (with detailed finding aid), Churchill has 4 boxes. The applicant will be introduced to working in an archive and then asked to start looking through the material for particularly relevant material to the project outlined above. I am particularly interested in Cam’s connections and networks – who she communicated with, about what, and any other individuals that might be worth further study that might turn up. This is a history role rather than a law role and should be appealing for students inclined towards feminist historical work and/or those who want to get some experience working with easily accessible archival materials.

• Supervisor: Dr Lovleen Bhullar
• Duration: 4 weeks
• Period: July
• Hours: Flexible

Summary:

I conduct research on international law and domestic law (especially in the UK and India) relating to the environment.

The research project seeks to draw lessons, from UK case-law, about the scope and limits of the Law of Torts in addressing environmental issues for India, another common law jurisdiction.

The student researcher is expected to

1. identify and compile UK case-law on environmental torts and related academic scholarship;
2. analyze this information to assess the scope and limits of tort law in addressing environmental issues;
3. prepare a brief report on their findings.

Requirements: Land Economy student (second year) or Law student (first/second year) with knowledge of the Law of Torts especially negligence and nuisance; ability to search law databases; good time management skills (essential). Interest in environmental law (desirable)

Duration: Four weeks in July.

• Supervisor: Professor Martin Dixon
• Duration: 4 weeks
• Period: Flexible
• Hours: Flexible

Summary:

This internship will comprise two projects

• Recent cases on rectification of the title register
• Estoppel cases after Guest v Guest

Both will be completed and lead to a research output, but can be done in the applicant’s preferred order.

You will be required to collect the cases and write a short summary of each.

• Supervisor: Dr Jerry Chen
• Duration: 6 weeks
• Period: Flexible
• Hours: Flexible

Summary:

The PLATO (Platform for Land-use Analysis and Transparent Outcomes) project will develop an agentic web platform to improve transparency and accountability in local planning decisions. Focused on Greater Cambridgeshire, PLATO addresses the information asymmetry between planners, residents, and developers by automatically retrieving, classifying, and visualising planning documents from district councils and the Combined Authority. The platform uses a fine-tuned language model to classify planning documents across ten policy domains (housing, transport, climate resilience, health, education, and others), joins these classifications with spatial data on amenity provision targets, and generates source-cited summaries for stakeholders. The result is a conversational agent supported by an interactive map to help planners identify gaps in proposed developments while enabling residents to understand what is being built in their area.

We are looking for an applicant to help build an agentic pipeline for urban spatial modelling. The successful candidate will contribute to prototype design, web dashboard development, and UX and usability testing with planners and residents. In return, you will gain experience working with applied AI in a live policy research context, and will be introduced to spatial equilibrium modelling and city-scale digital twins through close collaboration with the project team at the Department of Land Economy.

• Supervisor: Professor Peter Haynes
• Duration: 8 weeks
• Period: July/August
• Hours: 35 per week

Summary:

The wildfires in Australia in summer 2019/20 received international attention on account of their devastating impact on local landscape, wildlife and human population. Soon afterwards ongoing satellite observations of the stratosphere showed long-lived localised anomalies in smoke particles, originating in the wildfires, which ascended to altitudes of 25km or more before dissipating. Subsequent studies suggest that the smoke particles are trapped in strong anticyclonic vortices, which are driven by the heating due to absorption of sunlight by the smoke particles. A particular puzzle is why the observed vortices are anticyclones, rather than vertically aligned cyclone-anticyclone dipoles.

The project would consider two different aspects of the behaviour of the smoke-filled vortices: (i) how do the vortices emerge from a layer of injected smoke? (ii) can the existing results on emergence and survival of vortices be combined with atmospheric observations to give some predictions of the likelihood of conditions under which vortices emerge? Requirements are understanding of simple PDEs, some experience of relevant numerical techniques, and interest in the atmosphere and climate. The content of applied courses in IB Mathematics will be sufficient as a starting point.

• Supervisor: Professor Lucia Reisch
• Duration: 8-10 weeks
• Period: Flexible dates, can be taken in two separate periods i.e. July and September
• Hours: 20 – 37.5 per week

Summary:

This internship focuses on the PREDICT II project, where the applicant will help design and run online behavioural experiments and evaluate their results against predictions from large language models, requiring an interest in online study design and a basic understanding of AI systems, statistics, and machine learning workflows. The project combines secondary analysis of harmonised datasets on behavioural interventions in the domains of food and energy use with a newly designed online experiment for benchmarking predictive performance. A central aim is to systematically compare the forecasting accuracy of different predictive systems, including classical machine learning models, large language models, and human forecasters.

For transparency, the YNOT Internship is fully funded by the YNOT Funds.

This project is open to any current Queens’ undergraduate with the needed skill set. The project will best suit students of social science with a strong “tech” interest, but also students of computer science and engineering, with a strong interest in psychological and social science questions. What matters more than discipline is a strong interest in the project and the basic technical skills needed to work on the project.

The student researcher and the YNOT Lead researcher will meet regularly, at least one hour per week, in person or online. You will also participate in the weekly YNOT lab meetings online every Thursday, except during individual vacation periods. You will be able to work part-time remotely.

For questions, please contact Prof Lucia Reisch at Queens’ College.

Queens’ is committed to decreasing its carbon footprint.   As part of this, we have partnered with Belimo, a world leader in devices to measure and manage heating. In November, we installed Belimo sensors in Fisher and Cripps to help understand the performance of the heating systems in these buildings.

We are now looking for summer interns to help us analyse, draw insights and facilitate change from this data. We have a variety of projects suited to those with a quantitative and technical background.

This will not be your normal intern program!  You will be working in a real project, with meaningful impact.  We have ambitious ideas for a data driven concept to enable heritage sites to achieve their carbon and economic goals without sacrificing their heritage value. You will play an important role at a formative stage of this endeavour. To assist you there will be a range of key people across a diverse skills set.  You will put your skills to use developing practical applications.  You will learn how to define and refine product requirements, adapt delivery to changing resource and manage the tension between quality and execution. Some ideas for projects are given below, but we welcome suggestions from applicants.

• Visualisation – Build a consumer-friendly dashboard displaying real time data to facilitate engagement with the college community on our low carbon plan and behavioural change.
• Economic analysis – Create a series of economic measures against which performance can be measured.
• Unified dataset – Create a unified dataset from multiple system with a novel ontology to facilitate analytics.
• Transaction data – Leverage messaging protocols to enable transactional operations and drive efficiency in existing control systems.
• Prediction of electricity costs from weather data – Build a predictive model to enable energy to be optimised in the college.
• Optimisation models – Develop an energy optimization strategy for buildings across the Queens’ campus.

Terms:

You will receive £14.88 per hour and if you commit to this project and you will not be charged for your accommodation in Queens’ for the period of your commitment. The internship is open from 30^th June to 28^th September. Candidates are expected to commit at least 6 weeks.

Team:

• Sr John Chisholm, Hon Fellow Queens, Trustee Melete Foundation
• Dr John L Wilson, Fellow Commoner Queens’
• Dr Challenger Mishra, Bye Fellow, Queens. Assistant Research Professor, Department of Computer Science.

Applications to this internship are not completed via the online form. For an informal discussion and next steps, please contact John Wilson at jw2407@cam.ac.uk.