Francisco Portillo, a student of Spanish Language and Literature ( language ), is doing an internship at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language

Francisco Portillo, a student of Spanish Languagelanguage , and Literature at the School of Humanities and Social Sciencesresearch , has completed a summer internship at the BCBL (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language), one of the research centers at the University of the Basque Country ( reference letter ) dedicated to the scientific study of language and cognition.

Over the course of three months, our student has had the opportunity to discover new tools and methodologies applied to the study of language, participate in linguistic programs of study related to cognitive neuroscience, and put the knowledge acquired during the Degree into internship in a real-world context of research. “It has been an extremely enriching experience, thanks to the entire team that has supported me over these past few months,” he says.

Among his main responsibilities, he collaborated on one of the phases of development for WordLex, a project of research at the center. This experience, he notes, has helped him gain an insider’s understanding of how a high-level research center operates. Furthermore, the internship has allowed him to strengthen his technical skills. As he explains, part of his work involved writing scripts in the R and Python programming languages, a task that the student himself views as part of the current demands of experimental research .

In addition to technical and statistical work , our student has attended various educational talks and conferences that brought together professors and researchers from international universities— reference letter —in this field, such as Stanford University and Radboud University, among others. As he notes, this contact with researchers and specialists has helped broaden his perspective on the possibilities of research in linguistics and neuroscience. In addition, she has had the opportunity to participate in experimental sessions where she has gained firsthand insight into how methods such as the electroencephalogram (EEG), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and eye-tracking work.

Beyond the knowledge he has gained, one of the aspects he values most about this experience is the environment at work: “What I’ve liked most is the atmosphere at partnership that you experience at laboratory —how everyone is willing to help,” he notes, in addition to the opportunity to become familiar with procedures that, until now, he had known mainly through academic materials.