After spending two years cooped up in Toronto, spending the summer in Finland for the field component of my MA gave me a very welcome change in scenery. While at CERES, my focus has been on protest movements and contentious politics in Belarus, which informed my decision to begin a research internship with the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki. As part of my internship, I have been working as a research assistant on two projects – one of which is Electoral Malpratice, Cyber-Security and Political Consequences in Russia and Beyond (ElMaRB). The ElMaRB project team has given me such a wide range of tasks– I’ve been doing research and data collection, helping out with their in-house seminars, and even contributing to their blog, where I was given free rein within the context of the project to focus on my interests —  thus, I was able to write about Belarus’ recent constitutional referendum, and am working on another piece about the future of elections in Ukraine.