When Delaney Inman tells you she had a great summer, it’s not because she traveled to exotic locations or lazed on the beach for days. Instead, she took an online economics class, learned how to use the statistics software Stata, researched an aspect of the Social Security program and gave a group presentation on it, and heard from a range of professionals about their career paths in aging policy, financial security, public administration, and more.

Inman, a UMass Boston senior, along with junior Delia Whitehill and senior Katy Ochoa served as research fellows at the Center for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College, gaining research experience, course credits, and professional development. The CRR is one of six national centers in the Social Security Administration’s Retirement and Disability Research Consortium. The center’s staff conduct interdisciplinary research, train scholars, and disseminate information on all aspects of retirement income.

UMass Boston joined CRR in 2024 as an affiliate research institution. The collaboration opens opportunities for faculty research grants in addition to the undergraduate fellowships. CRR redesigned the fellowships this year to offer them exclusively to UMass Boston undergraduates. The goal is “to continue building more diverse academic research populations while increasing young people’s awareness of career opportunities and academic fields that may be new to them,” says Jan Mutchler, who helped recruit and vet students for the summer opportunity as director of the Gerontology Institute and co-director of the CRR’s Retirement and Disability Research Consortium.

Andrew Eschtruth, CRR’s deputy director, was struck by how focused the three fellows were on their futures. That’s the precise aim of the Social Security Administration in funding the fellowships, he says: to offer more exposure to potential careers in finance and economics, especially those from historically underrepresented backgrounds. “The SSA sees it as an investment in the field, to help attract more young people to this work a few years down the road.”

“I really valued how they focused the fellowship on what would help us,” says Inman, who is pursuing a double major in urban public health along with exercise and health science. “There was a lot of focus on preparing for our next steps, whether that’s graduate school or finding work.” The fellowships offered a housing allowance along with a stipend, a bonus that made all the difference to Inman. “Having that financial stability allows you to focus. I could get the most out of the opportunity without having to work a second job.”

Whitehill, a finance and economics major, agrees that the value of the CRR fellowship was how much she learned about research and careers. “I loved it,” she says. “What they really wanted us to do was learn, not just complete tasks. I loved the lunchtime speaker series, when they brought in people to talk about their work and offer career advice.” Each fellow was assigned a mentor. Whitehill’s mentor helped her think about the relative merits of working for a few years after graduating versus various master’s programs, questions she says she will continue to explore these next two years.

Even though Inman earned an A in the 300-level economics class—her first class in the discipline—the fellowship didn’t convince her to enter the field of economics. But she found plenty of overlap in the policy research work with her interest in urban public health. She knows how valuable the summer experience was. “As far as post-graduation, it gave me more information,” she says, “and made me more confident about my options.”

Read more about the UMass Boston Gerontology partnership with CRR