Where Academia Meets Impact - GALLANT Internship 2025-26
Published: 6 March 2026
Blog post by Laavanya Varadarajan Shanmugapriya
Rare, is the opportunity to blend your academic interests, personal passion and career aspirations into one unified pursuit. I am incredibly grateful to GALLANT to have been given this very opportunity during my role as Undergraduate Research Intern for the GALLANT project. In this blog, I articulate my experience throughout 40 incredible weeks of learning, curiosity and growth.
With little previous experience working in a large research powerhouse like GALLANT, I walked into the Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Research Centre on 23 June 2025, brimming with a blend of excitement and curiosity about the unknown. It is this very spirit that carried me through the duration of my internship – where I learnt the true meaning and purpose of research. After brief introductions (and learning how to work a ‘work’ laptop), I naively set out on an expedition to uncover everything there is to know about Community Wealth Building (CWB) – a local economic development agenda that was making waves across policy labs, local authorities, parliament roundtables and academia.
As I searched and re-searched, I learned my first lesson in academia: the pursuit of knowledge is an infinite horizon. My workdays soon began to resemble Glasgow’s long midsummer light—starting with reading for breakfast, arriving at lunchtime starving with curiosity, and ending with even more questions than I began with. By the early hours of the next morning, I would find myself reading again, drawn back into that beautiful, confusing, and endlessly rewarding cycle. At regular intervals, this cycle of knowledge pursuit was reoriented, augmented and reenergised with enlightening conversations with colleagues, partners and experts.
By the end of summer 2025, my colleagues and I had a well-developed understanding of the principles of CWB, Glasgow’s current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in advancing CWB, and the broader impact of CWB across the 44 Thriving Glasgow definitions. The novelty of the research topic in the local context led us to devise an innovative methodology based on a careful fusion of systems mapping, quantitative analysis, experiential knowledge and literature review. Despite my initial inhibition towards internally accepting a non-traditional methodology, this experience enhanced my understanding of the essential components of good research practice – going beyond superficial guidelines that I previously followed without questioning. This brings me to my second main takeaway – extraordinary research involves systematically finding answers to questions that cannot be answered by surveys and statistics alone.
The last yet most important stage of my internship involved effectively communicating our findings to diverse audience groups. The volume of our findings and reduction in working time added to the challenge. However, after numerous rounds of honest and open discussions about discourse, storytelling and non-technical messaging, I feel confident that our forthcoming report to the Glasgow City Council will help policymakers prepare to advance the CWB agenda efficiently – using what’s right with Glasgow to resolve whatever maybe wrong with Glasgow (adapted from John Swinney’s “there is nothing wrong with Scotland that can't be fixed by what is right with Scotland”). Furthermore, a journal article that I will be helping with during the final leap of this journey will help other city-university partnerships as they seek to use evidence-informed policy interventions for the betterment of people, planet and prosperity. I believe the communication skills, presentation skills and time management that I have been tested on at this stage has prepared me to effectively use academic research to drive meaningful impact in the real-world – a first step on the path towards my future career aspirations.
Special thanks to Jo Winterbottom, Dr. Sarah Lester, Val McNeice, Neil McInroy, Prof. Mark Logan, Marie McLelland, Stephanie Bartels, Dr. Richard Brunner and WS1 colleagues for their generosity with time and knowledge to support me on this journey.
First published: 6 March 2026