Sooyeon loves gummies. Choosing them is another matter: in a supermarket candy aisle she could stand for what felt like all day, weighing one bag against the next and unable to decide. In a research course in Seoul, that habit became a behavioral-economics paper on why shoppers agonize over small choices, and the team paper she worked on was published in a journal. In April 2026, she was admitted as a transfer student to both UC Berkeley and UCLA.
An unlikely starting point
Sooyeon did not come from an international school. She graduated from a Korean high school, and when her university admissions in Korea did not go the way she had hoped, she enrolled at a community college in the United States to work toward a transfer. She came to CRI as a first-year student there.
Her English was far from fluent, and writing an academic paper in English was hard even to picture. The word "paper" alone sounded so imposing that she hesitated to begin.
From sweeping topics to one small habit
Like many first-time researchers, Sooyeon assumed a paper had to announce a world-changing discovery or wrestle with a dense academic theory. She was eager to finish one, but the topics she brought in were so broad and ambitious that they would have challenged an undergraduate. Each time, she lost her footing.
The turning point came in a casual conversation about everyday life, when her professor heard about the candy aisle. Sooyeon weighed so many factors that she could barely settle on a bag. It was a serious case of indecision, the kind most people would laugh off as a harmless quirk.
CRI saw it differently and put a question to her: "Then why don't we find out, academically, why choosing gummies is so hard for you?" The focus broadened from gummies to snacks, among the most ordinary things people buy, and to the psychology of why shoppers deliberate irrationally before they decide. The paper that came out of it is titled "Understanding the Interplay between Cognitive Biases and Heuristics in Consumer Behavior." A frustration Sooyeon lived with every day had become the seed of a research project.
Learning to think like a behavioral economist
To study the question properly, Sooyeon took a behavioral economics course in Seoul with Andrea Bernini, who teaches economics at the University of Oxford. Through that lens, her hesitation in the candy aisle touched two rich research areas: decision-making under uncertainty, and heuristics, the intuitive shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly.
