Frances Payne

Frances Payne is a third-year student who has done an excellent job by combining, without delay, academic success (an average score of 3.89 on a scale of 1 to 4) with a number of important extracurricular activities. Ever since her first year, Frances has been active in the UCG student association Caerus, where she was involved, among other things, in the sports committee and the foundation and design of the Civitas charity committee. Through this last committee, she has also been working for an NGO called Just a Drop (Richmond, UK), where she also worked as an intern during the summer holidays. This NGO is committed to clean and safe drinking water everywhere in the world. With the help of a recently obtained grant from the Zonta International Foundation, she will also be doing an additional internship there in the near future.
It is important to note that Frances, as a student assessor, played an important role in the Faculty Board in the second year of her degree programme. In this role, she was not only active within the faculty, but also involved in initiating and maintaining external contacts at both a university and national level.
Her special experience during her exchange project in Hong Kong certainly deserves to be mentioned here. Her stay in Hong Kong was dominated by the ongoing and fierce protests. It taught her a lot, both in theory and in real life, about Chinese politics and economics. Under the guidance of her supervisor in Groningen, Dr Annika van Baar, she is writing her bachelor thesis on these findings.
Writing is something that comes easy to Frances; she already wrote an article about Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem in political economy, she is publishing a book called ‘The Untold Stories of War’ and she is co-editor of the book ‘The New Groninger Cookbook’.
After a broad orientation and development within the UCG in the fields of political science, philosophy and international business science, she decided that she wanted to continue studying political economy. She has selected a Master's degree programme at the Graduate School for Social Sciences of the University of Amsterdam.