Megan Riksen:

Hello and welcome to the Work Lake, a Laker podcast. I'm Megan Ricksen, and today I'm joined by my co-host Brian Bossick. Hi Brian.

Brian Bossick:

Hey Megan.

Megan Riksen:

So today we are going to be talking about research, so how students can gain research experience, why might be important, what sort of opportunities that GVSU has to offer, all that sort of good stuff. So you wanna kick us off with kinda one of the first ways?

Brian Bossick:

You bet. So research, one of the first things I think about when I, I hear from students is that you can take a research course and that might be like a research methods class. Or sometimes research is in a capstone course. But that is usually, usually like the first time a student's gonna get introduced to research, the idea of research.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. And some of the methods behind that, right. To kinda give you some background.

Brian Bossick:

Absolutely. <Laugh>,

Megan Riksen:

Good deal. Yeah. Then the next would be you could do research within your internship or work experience. So maybe you find an internship that specifically is focused on research, or maybe you, you know, you get a internship within, let's say, marketing and you realize, ooh, I really like the consumer behavior aspect of this. I wanna do research on that. And you find a way to work with your supervisor to do that. So yeah, I think that definitely is an outside of the classroom opportunity.

Brian Bossick:

Yeah. And there's, I think one other that comes to mind too, if it isn't in a class or it's not an internship, sometimes you can do extracurricular research. And I think the big question that often comes with that is how, how do I do that? Yeah. <laugh>. So here at Grand Valley we have the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship, and they do an amazing job of getting you connected. So we will be talking much more about that in the podcast today, but that they're a wonderful resource. They will walk with you step by step in the process and really help you get connected if you wanna start that journey into research.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah, absolutely. We'll, we definitely will be going more in depth on that. And you might be wondering, why, why should I be doing research? Great question. Is this gonna be beneficial to me in the long term or short term? Because, you know, it, it can be a big commitment. I do think that might be a myth we'll be able to debunk a little bit in terms of commitment level. But studies have shown that students who participate in undergraduate research have higher graduation rates, have increased levels of learning, increased professional benefits, and enhanced per personal development. So that's according to the Tennessee Board of Regents Office of Policy and Strategy. So I think there's some good stuff that can come from it.

Brian Bossick:

Absolutely. And not to mention, like as you graduate, those skills that you bring your employers will love, and we'll talk more about that soon too.

Megan Riksen:

Okay. So to tell us more about research opportunities on campus, we have Dr. Susan Mendoza joining us. She is the director for the Center of Undergraduate Scholar Engagement here at GVSU. Welcome, Susan.

Susan Mendoza:

Thank you.

Megan Riksen:

Thanks so much for being here. And we're excited because we, we think you're a bit of an expert on this topic, right?

Susan Mendoza:

A little bit <laugh>. I've had a couple, a couple years doing the work. Just a couple. So a little last century, but I can do my best.

Megan Riksen:

<Laugh>. So good. So I'm just gonna let you kind of jump in with just a introduction of who you are, what you do, maybe what your center does. Give us a little background.

Susan Mendoza:

So in our office, we love acronyms. So the Center for Undergraduate Scholar Engagement, we call it QS and Qs, our work essentially supports students that are interested in academic and creative work and experiences and projects outside the classroom. Okay. So there are offices on campuses that provide support for their curricular work, things that students do in the classroom. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we're really interested on students' creativity their interests, their curiosity outside the classroom. And we do that with two different offices. The first office is the Frederik Meijer Office of Fellowships. So the fellowships office supports students who are interested in doing things outside of Grand Valley and provide some, some support for applications for that process. So folks wanna know more about that. They can do the gvsu.edu/fellowships.

Megan Riksen:

Awesome. We'll throw that in the show notes.

Susan Mendoza:

Thank you. Thank you. I'm sure I'll have some show note tips that I'll pass along as well.

Megan Riksen:

Perfect, that would be great.

Susan Mendoza:

The other office is the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship. So that office in particular provides support for students who are interested, interested in doing research, scholarship, creative work that again, is outside the classroom. But is supported by our faculty. So students who might wanna explore a particular question or explore an idea with their art or their music or their dance, they work with a faculty member to explore that in a variety of different ways. That's what OURS does. That's the other acronym.

Megan Riksen:

Very good. Well, that's helpful.

Brian Bossick:

That sounds amazing.

Megan Riksen:

It does. I like how you describe research in terms of art and creativity and all, this broad definition. That's very cool to hear.

Susan Mendoza:

One thing that students struggle with, faculty, colleagues struggle with parents struggle with is understanding what research is.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah.

Susan Mendoza:

And I know when I started this role, I always thought of research as my colleagues that have the coats on the white coats and might work in the wet labs pipetting. Or my experience when I was in college, which was a minute ago. And being in the archives or being in the stacks in the library with physical books.

Megan Riksen:

Yes. Those would definitely be the two images that would come to my mind.

Susan Mendoza:

So and one of the reasons why we tend to use research, scholarship and creative work is because there are different ways in which students from different majors and disciplines explore questions. And we wanna make sure that students recognize that any way, in any way in which they explore a question is engaging in research. Research really is being curious about something and exploring it in a variety of different ways. So I just like to clarify that from the beginning. That's helpful for folks.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. That's very helpful.

Brian Bossick:

I like that. I was curious if somebody comes to you with that curiosity, how might you help them?

Susan Mendoza:

So I have a colleague who always asks the question, what problem do you wanna solve? Okay. So she tends to, this is Dr. Linda, Linda Chamberlain. She's a, a chemist by training. But her focus is at the university is helping folks with patents and bringing things to market. Right. She's always asking the question, what problem do you wanna solve? And oftentimes that has folks pause and they're like, you know, I wanna better understand global warming. I wanna better understand health inequity. I wanna better understand the weather going with the last example. Right. That's one way in which we try to help folks is clarify what's interesting to them. I will ask folks where, where the time sucks are, so where's the rabbit hole's late at night? You're on Instagram and you're going down rabbit holes. What piques your curiosity? Like, what makes your head happy? Not, not your procrastination self, right? But where do you find yourself wanting to learn more and what does that look like? Or I might ask a student, tell me about your favorite class or your favorite lecture. What was that that caught you? One of the things about students, and I think especially with the pandemic, and I find this for myself, I don't always feel like I have permission to ask good questions. Because I'm always trying to give the answer that someone is looking for. Not the authentic question. And so helping folks ask authentic questions is really powerful. So that tends to be where we start.

Brian Bossick:

That's, no, that's great. And, and once they've started to formulate that, is that part of your role helping to connect them to maybe who the next person is to help them investigate that or figure out how to do that?

Susan Mendoza:

Yeah. That's the point of college, right?

Brian Bossick:

Yes, exactly. It really is.

Susan Mendoza:

So that, that's the point of college is that we want folks to have questions and figure out how to explore them in a way that helps them move towards an answer. Okay. So that might be working with a particular faculty member. It might be thinking about a particular approach. It might be working with one of my library colleagues to better understand the question itself. Okay. So we do kind of put in there the next steps. And so for some students it's trying to figure out who to connect with. For some students it's realizing that connecting is an option. That they can reach out to faculty, they can reach out to folks and ask the question.

Megan Riksen:

When we say the term research, I know, at least for me, probably for you too, Brian, a lot of kind of myths come to mind. Can you debunk, and I'm sure you get many of these kind of in your office all the time, but can you debunk what some of the common myths might be around research? I mean, it kind of goes back to what you were saying at the beginning. Like, we imagine that person in the lab coat, with the pipette. Can you just kind of share your thoughts on that?

Susan Mendoza:

The assumptions, right. So the assumptions, so probably, let me think for a moment. One of the biggest ones I run into is students. We all make assumptions about what a good student is and folks can't see it, but I'm using air quotes. "Good student." Good grades. Right. And this assumption that having good grades means that you're a good learner, which isn't always true. So one of the myths or the assumptions I hear students make is, well, don't I have to be a four point student or don't I have to be very active in participating in class? Or don't I have to have taken that class? Or, or, or, or, or. And the one thing that's interesting is that the students who do best in undergraduate research are students who are not afraid of failure. Because research when you dunno what the answer's gonna be, and you're trying a different approach, you're gonna screw it up. And there's powerful learning from that. So failure and that comfort with failure is really, really critical. We actually have a program we do in February around Valentine's Day called Falling in Love with Failure where we -

Megan Riksen:

Great name.

Susan Mendoza:

We think it's awesome. So we pull together faculty and they, it's a panel of faculty talking about their failures in their work and how important failure is in learning. And it's a lovely experience and you learn so much about your faculty colleagues. And I always encourage folks to attend, but that comfort and failure is one characteristic folks need. The other piece is sheer will and grit and persistence. Right. So if you're not gonna get it right, learning from what you did wrong, trying and trying again, getting that feedback. And if, if learning is the center then that student would be a good researcher, scholar, performer, right. Artist. Yes. Right. so it's very powerful. So I think that's the first myth that I think of. The second myth is it's not applicable to all majors. It's only students, right. Who work in the field. Again, air quotes in the sciences, so maybe outside, it's in the lab, right. Mathematicians do research, physicists do research. The amount of research that goes into artwork is phenomenal.

Megan Riksen:

Wow. I would not think that.

Susan Mendoza:

So it's more than the "smart folks." It's more than particular majors and disciplines. And it also can be punctuated. So you don't have to do all of the research process from hypothesis or idea generation to sharing it. You can just do a part.

Brian Bossick:

That's a great point.

Megan Riksen:

That's very encouraging.

Brian Bossick:

Yeah. They get, they get caught. Right. They get caught in. This is so big. Yeah. Where do I, and if I commit, I've committed many -

Megan Riksen:

Like I'm writing this master's level thesis or something.

Susan Mendoza:

And it doesn't need to be that. We have this desire to complete things, but research is oftentimes not completed. It's this endless process. But you can start with just asking a really good question. You can start with a literature review. You can maybe contribute to data collection, do some sketches. Do some composition. So it's engaging in the question that is research. It's not doing the thing at the end, which might be a presentation or an exhibit or a performance. It's kind of anything in between. So I always ask, you know, what's limiting you? What's giving you some hesitations. And that oftentimes is a myth. Well, isn't it just the smart kids? No, not really.

Brian Bossick:

Right.

Susan Mendoza:

I'm just letting you know, the, the, the b kids who have to hustle are amazing researchers. So it's, it's really helping someone to think about what questions they have is not the faculty member's questions. It's the questions the students have that tend to be the most powerful and the most interesting.

Megan Riksen:

Very cool. Yeah.

Brian Bossick:

If if a student does take this leap and they, they say, hey, I'm gonna do this what are some of the benefits they can get from, from doing research?

Susan Mendoza:

I mentioned a couple earlier, right? So it's kind of this, it's training your mind to engage in inquiry. So a lot of students I work with sometimes will be thinking about graduate school or professional school. And they know that research is something they're supposed to pursue, but they don't always know why. And so we'll talk about how engaging in research is a way of training your mind to inquire, look for false fallacies, figure out how to how to ask a question and pursue the answer. And what's the method and approach? So there's that piece of it. As I mentioned earlier, all of our students work with faculty mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah. So they, they are apprenticing learning how to do research under the support or mentorship or guidance or coaching of a faculty member. And that relationship's really important because it doesn't matter what you're gonna do, you're gonna need a reference.

Brian Bossick:

That's a good point. Right?

Susan Mendoza:

Whether it's graduate school, a job, whatever it may be, you're gonna want a reference and you're gonna want someone who knows you well.

Megan Riksen:

And I would imagine those people get to know, you get to know your faculty member in that sort of a setting, it's probably a lot easier than in the classroom setting where they have 30 other students or 20, or...

Susan Mendoza:

It's, it's that one-on-one relationship. They get to know you, what you're good at, what you're struggling with, how you ask questions., how you learn, how you handle failure. There are very, very rich references. And it's not just the reference, it's the support. After you graduate, most faculty will know what their students are doing 10, 15, 20 years down the road. Which is lovely. It's incredible. And it makes, it makes Grand Valley a little bit smaller in a good way. So you have that support and guidance. So there's, there's the faculty mentorship piece of it, guidance, there is the training, the mind piece of it, but there's also the practical piece of it. So you can earn credit doing undergraduate research. So that's independent research. Independent study. So that's a 399 or 499. Oftentimes there'll be paid opportunities to get involved in research either as undergraduate research assistants you might be able to, I mentioned earlier, collecting data, doing literary review, whatever it may be. That can be a paid job. That's not unusual on campus. It's pretty common. So there are lots of different benefits from the cash piece of it, right? Getting paid to do cool things, learning how to kind of approach these questions and getting the support, the guidance from faculty. And the one I always like to add at the end, because my research students that I've worked with in the past remind me all the time, it's fun. So they remind me that this is fun. We enjoy it, we love working together. Oftentimes we're communities of students that are doing the research and they, they just are a peer group and they're a group that support one another over time. And so that's the other piece of it is the social component. Which is oftentimes the piece I don't think about, but our students always think about.

Megan Riksen:

Very cool. Very cool. So you've touched a little bit on what your center does. Can you just break that down a little bit? Like tell us a little bit more about the fellowships side of things. The funding, professional development, even like support for graduate school. Can you just kinda break down a few of those?

Susan Mendoza:

Yeah, we try not to do all the things, but we end up doing all the things. Right. So let, goodness, let me start with the first piece is I'm gonna say advising. So in our office we have professional advisors. I serve in that role. So advise students who are interested in doing research. I also provided advising and guidance to faculty. That's one of my areas of specialty. Because faculty wanna figure out how best to support students and what that looks like. So we do provide support for them as well. We have faculty fellows, so we have faculty that are in our office as part of their job, if you will. And they provide support to students. So if a student is really interested in a particular area, then I might connect them with one of our faculty fellows. So Anna Hammersmith from sociology is one of our faculty fellows. Her specialty is elder care and really thinking about healthcare systems for the elderly and the aging. And she does fantastic work. We have Jody Hunt in our office who does a lot of work with John Ball Zoo and studying animals. So it's bringing in researchers to provide that support to students. We also have graduate students and undergraduate students, or undergraduate research ambassadors are students who have done research that are trained to support other students. So they can provide that guidance and information kind of get, if students wanna get a sense of what is this really like? I don't wanna talk to,

Megan Riksen:

I don't want that faculty member to tell me...

Susan Mendoza:

No, and I, I don't wanna talk to Dr. Mendoza either. They can totally talk with one of our undergraduate research ambassadors and so that's another option. So our office provides advising and guidance, I guess is the first piece. The second piece is we provide programs and grants. So programs and grants would be opportunities that we have through our office for students can get involved in research from the more basic, so being a research assistant, having a job where you might perform a task we were kinda joking about pipetting earlier something like that, transcribing interviews, they can do that piece, or they might have their own research question. They wanna devote a full-time full-time summer to that, let's say. And they will explore that research question for 12 weeks with a faculty member. That's another one of the programs that we have. So we try to make sure that students have the opportunity to engage in research without having many barriers and financial as part of that. So both of those programs provide support for students. So similar to a job. We also provide project supplies. So if someone wants to explore a particular piece of music and they need to get the rights to a few scores, we provide support for that. We support a hundred students plus a year traveling to conferences and competitions. So they don't have to take on any of that, any of that financial burden. But they can go away and be smart, share all their, the cool things that they've done. So there's -

Megan Riksen:

and again, the networking component that I'm sure is -

Susan Mendoza:

Absolutely. That's really, really true. And we provide support for that too. So you had mentioned kind of professional development. So we wanna make sure students have the support in figuring out how to network. So I'm naturally a, a very strong introvert. So networking in large groups is very uncomfortable for me. It doesn't come naturally. And so in our office, we have a program called Anchoring Research, and it's a series of kind of shorter seminars or programs that are either recorded or in person or via Zoom. And we talk about some of the skills that students might want or need. And that includes how do you network at a conference? How do you network in general? What is research? What are some library skills that might be helpful? So we try to do some of that additional training for them. And the last piece that I think of with our office is some of these larger celebration events. So an example would be in the fall we have undergraduate research fair. So undergraduate research fair is always the first Tuesday in October, and it's in the Grand River room in the Kirkoff Center. And we have faculty from all over campus who are there just to nerd out and to share to share what they do. Oh, yes. They love talking about their work and how, how they can involve students and how students can be engaged. And a student might come to a table and have a really cool idea. This happened a few years ago. We had a student who was a physics student, but also was a performance major for the oboe. And so she was fascinated by oboe reeds and how they were carved as that connected to physics. And so you had one faculty member walking her to the other table, and that's how her project started. And she did a summer project on the oboe read, did additional work on acoustics, then a one off to grad school to study study musicology. But it's really cool opportunities just to see what's available, and, you know, the introverts like me can kind of hang back and observe. And then my team will be there as well, so we can answer any questions. So that's in the fall. In the spring, or in the winter as we say at Grand Valley. The winter. The second Wednesday in April. So it's generally the second week in April, we have Student Scholars Day. And there are a lot of different events associated with that. So we'll have generally four to 500 students presenting their work.

Megan Riksen:

That's so great.

Susan Mendoza:

Exhibits and national speakers, and it's really kind of cool. So we try to celebrate what scholarship and research and creative work is and demonstrate that across campus and showcase what students are doing. And the last little plug I'll make is for students who do get involved in undergraduate research, they do get involved in creative work. We're one of the few programs, the few universities, and I think the only one in Michigan that provides a transcript designation, so they can actually have it say on their transcript, "Undergraduate research scholar Undergraduate. Creative scholar." And it's, it's a university endorsement of their work. And so they get the happy little certificate. Right. I like those things. They get a little certificate, but they also receive cords because it's an honorary. So that's another thing that we do to try to recognize their work in a very public way.

Megan Riksen:

Very cool. And then what a great little resume builder. You can just throw that way in there.

Susan Mendoza:

It is, it's quite lovely. And then you get, you get the regalia bling. Right.

Brian Bossick:

Exactly.

Susan Mendoza:

You get all the fun stuff.

Megan Riksen:

We call fancy.

Susan Mendoza:

I know, right? It's important to be fancy

Megan Riksen:

<Laugh>. So, good. That's awesome. All right. So this was super informative. I learned a lot. Thank you.

Brian Bossick:

I did too. Yes. I, I thought it was a topic. I'm like, I, I think I know, but yeah, my mind is somewhat blown right now.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. I think my mind is a little blown.Thank you Dr. Mendoza.

Susan Mendoza:

Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure.

Megan Riksen:

Awesome. So we definitely will include information on your office, on your center, in the show notes. But just as kind of your final plug for your center, do you want them to make an students to make an advising appointment? What's kind of that very, very first entry point if they're curious for research.

Susan Mendoza:

I'm gonna say do something. So everyone's something is different. So make an appointment. Hop on our website. Which is of course gvsu.edu/ours, which will be in the show notes. But make an appointment. You can, even if you have a faculty member and when you're in classes, you just think they're really cool, go to their office hours and say, tell me about your research. And they'll talk your ear off. So be sure to block some time for that. But start, you know, start asking those questions. We will always be there. So you can come see us in the first semester of your first year at Grand Valley. You can come see us as a sophomore or junior seniors, you move quickly, <laugh>, but it's just do something, and to take that first step. The, the other thing I oftentimes hear from students is I'm just not sure. How do I talk to a faculty member? How do I ask that question? In our office, we've all been there. We're, we're an office of introverts that aren't always sure. And this is important to work to, to us. So reach out via email, stop by the library. We're on the second floor of the library. If you go to the main staircase, you dead end into our office. And we always have chocolate and, and treats. So stop by. So if nothing else, you get a little bit of sugar.

Megan Riksen:

Perfect. Yeah. I mean, who doesn't need that? Sugar and, you know, you might open your mind for the rest of your life/

Susan Mendoza:

Yeah. Open your mind then sugar.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. Perfect. Awesome. Well, I think that concludes our questions. So thank you again.

Susan Mendoza:

Oh, thank you for the opportunity. It was a delight to speak with both of you. And I hope to see, see some of your listeners or hear some of your listeners or read their emails when they email the office.

Megan Riksen:

That would be great. Thank you!

Susan Mendoza:

Yeah, that'd be great.

Megan Riksen:

And now we're going to hear from Ian Curtis, who is a GVSU student that has participated in research. So Ian, can you start by introducing yourself and tell us what is your major and what made you interested in getting involved with research?

Ian Curtis:

So my name is Ian Curtis. I come from Grandville, Michigan. And I am a French and a statistics major. I started out as a math major, ended up changing that to statistics 'cause I was more interested in the applied setting of math. But in terms of research, I, I got started in my freshman year. And it was really the French program that drove me to do research. I wanted to do research in math. And they just, they recommended that I have a few more or a few more semesters of experience just to get enough of that basic knowledge to start research, which was fair. And so I wanted to, to get into research somehow because of the, the benefits that I had heard about some of the, the skills that I could learn. I had heard about presentation skills, about working with a faculty member, one-on-one getting minds on my resume. All those things that I thought would be beneficial in the future and would help me in the moment too learning the, the content necessary to help me through my major and my minor.

Megan Riksen:

That's great. Those seem like excellent reasons to get involved with research.

Ian Curtis:

With GVSU, I became connected with that research specifically the freshman year. In the fall, I went to the undergraduate research fair that the Office of Undergraduate Research puts on where basically all the departments on campus come and come into one central location. They share what research means to that department. And they also share any professors who have expressed interest in recruiting undergraduate students to help them with the research. And this is where I went to the, the math department first, and they said I should probably be getting a few more of the basic classes, which is totally understandable. So I went over to the French table and I found my current professor was on the list of professors looking for students to do research with. And he, he was researching a, an 18th century French encyclopedia and all the scandals and situations and articles and everything that went with it. And I was intrigued by this. It, it piqued my interest and it also helped that he was my current professor. So I was able to take that flyer and think about what I wanted to do with research and take, I looked at some of the other professors who were on there as well. But ultimately I was able to just talk to him in class. I went up to him in class and I said, Hey, I, I saw that you're looking for a research assistant. Can you tell me a little bit more about what, what you are into? 'cause I'm interested. And we had a meeting and I sat down and he told me a little bit about what he was doing. And I found out I also really enjoyed what he was doing. I thought it was quite interesting looking into historical scandals and trying to figure out who thought what, when and where. And so we decided to work together from that point on. And I ended up doing some research projects with him. Over a couple of summers I did a library, summer scholars program where also under Amber Dierking, who is a GVSU librarian. And basically the point of that program was to develop a project that benefited the library in some sort or future researchers. That same summer, I worked with Dr. David Ike, who is the French professor that I was working with. And he was developing a role playing game to be played in classrooms in French. Where each student gets assigned a role in history and history is reenacted. Whether that stays the same as real history or not is up to the course of the game. But he was developing this game on the French encyclopedia that I had been researching for a little bit now, and he asked for some help refining the game, updating the bibliography which I was able to do because I had done, just finished this research project about collecting some sources for all about the encyclopedia. So I, I was in a prime position to help him out with this. So he invited me on to help make sure the game was up to date. It had good information in it. And then I went through, also did a bunch of grammar correction. I even wrote my own two characters into the game and added a, a new scandal into the different, into the game to add a new anti enlightenment side, anti encyclopedia side. And that was enough that they were willing to put my name on there as a contributor. Or the next summer I did an S Cubed project, a student Summer Scholars project. And this one was based off of the research that I had done in the prior summer. One of the, or some of the characters that I had added to that game were central to a plagiarism accusation scandal against this encyclopedia in 1758/1759. There was one, one particular character who, who really focused on the supplemental images to this encyclopedia. And he claimed they were plagiarized. And based off of my research, the literature had not really determined if this guy was correct, were they actually plagiarized and were, if so, why, if not, then why was he accusing? And so I devoted an entire summer to try and answer the question of whether these were plagiarized. And although I didn't quite get the answer I wanted, I I feel like it was very beneficial to contribute to the body of research on the encyclopedia.

Megan Riksen:

Wow. That is a lot to pack into a short amount of time. Sounds like really, really cool experience. So we heard that you've done research in some very different areas. Can you kind of explain how you pivoted from one area to the other?

Ian Curtis:

It was at a point where I felt good enough to start talking to my stats and my computer science professors to see what my options were now that I had had a bunch of stats courses and other experience through class projects behind me. And so I reached out with one of my old professors. I took an intro to Python course I think it was early on in my freshman year. And I reached back out to the professor of that course asking if she would be willing to work with me on a project for my honor senior project. And she said, yeah. So Erin, Dr. Erin Carrier and I, we worked on a Spotify recommendation algorithm that was specifically designed to be used in a research lab or for research purposes. So basically I wanted to figure out if, if, if we give people control over how their recommendations are created, will they be more satisfied with those recommendations regardless of the, if the recommendations are actually better or not? Will they be perceived as better if the user had some control over how they were created? And so I designed, I coded a, a recommendation algorithms from, from using Spotify's online services to try and answer that question. And although I didn't, I wasn't able to test it in a experimental setting I was able to create the, the algorithm itself to be used perhaps in future research purposes. So the transition itself from French to STA statistics wasn't terribly difficult for me simply because I was already in involved in both of those majors both of those disciplines. And I, I just had to ask professors that I had had in the past. So I feel like that was a great connection, is having professors who I either currently had or had had in the past they were kind of my gateway into the research interest in whatever I was interested in. Even if my professor had said no, she didn't want to work with me I would've asked her for help in, in getting connected with another faculty member. I found that once you, once, once you're in the know with one faculty member, you typically also can easily get involved with a number of others who are their colleagues. Faculty work together more often than not. So the transition was not terribly difficult for me because of those faculty connections.

Megan Riksen:

It is so good to hear that you were able to reach back out to a faculty member from an intro course that you had in your freshman year. That's very cool. So what was your favorite part of your research experience?

Ian Curtis:

For me, the, the, the real joy in doing research is sharing that research with the rest of the world. So I did, I've done multiple presentations now where I did a recorded one online. I did a in-person poster presentation, and just this year I did a oral presentation for one of my class projects in a capstone class. And so sharing what I've done with other people is really cool.

Megan Riksen:

That is very cool to be able to share your research with the, with the rest of the world. I love that. That's your favorite part. So how has research influenced your future career plans?

Ian Curtis:

Although I haven't quite figured out my future research plans and my future plans in general my research overall has encouraged me to go on to get a master's degree in terms of career. I'm not quite sure exactly where I want to go or what, where life is gonna take me. I, my guess is that it's gonna be very difficult to avoid in involving research in wherever I end up going, because especially with stats, research is just there. Data is the result of research. It's the result of exploration and data analysis is just turning that research into interpreter results. And of course, my favorite part is sharing the knowledge with everybody else, and that's a part of research as well. So I would love to get into a position that involves something like that, of grabbing, having data, interpreting the data, and sharing the trends and the results with, with other people. So wherever, wherever I go, I'm, I would like to have that as a part of my job. I feel like that would make me very happy and something that I really want to get into.

Megan Riksen:

Thank you so much, Ian. Research really does seem like such a transformative experience. You know, once you maybe have done some research and you're thinking, okay, I've had all of these amazing experiences, I want to be able to share these experiences with others, maybe specifically with, you know, professionals you're networking with or in an interview. That's a really good thing to start thinking about before you're actually applying, right? So you can maybe start with thinking about how to incorporate it on your resume and your cover letter. Maybe in your personal statement, if graduate school is the next step for you you definitely will want to include specific details about your research on your resume in any sort of those application materials. Because I think it'll be a really great opportunity to write some of those accomplishment statements so it's not just, you know, I did some research with a faculty member for a semester, but it's, what was that question you were exploring as Dr. Mendoza was talking about? What came from that, which piece of the research were you doing? What were those hands on components? I really think there's, there's a lot that you can incorporate there.

Brian Bossick:

Absolutely. And I think as you work to incorporate that there's a couple tips on how to help share your, your results as well. Sometimes the work you do, you can get it published and maybe that's in a journal, maybe that's in a presentation you did at a conference. And those are all things you can reference in interviews in your resume. One of the important things as Megan was saying, is how do you share this information? Right? we suggest you practice condensing the summary of your research to that, that brief elevator pitch. So that when somebody asks you, yeah, what did you study? You've got that 32nd to a minute quick condensed version, and then you can -

Megan Riksen:

That's compelling, right? Like, you wanna craft this like, compelling way of saying it. 'cause We know you did some cool stuff, right? But you gotta be able to say it pretty quickly

Brian Bossick:

Yes. In a way that potentially Yes. Then if they want more questions, they can dive into that. So think about how you summarize that almost like when somebody asks you something that's important about you, how do you summarize that? Absolutely. the other thing to think about as you are applying and as you're kind of putting all this together, how does the position you're applying for tie into your research skills? So think about how you highlight that in a cover letter, your resume, an interview. There are so many transferable skills and if you have questions about how to do that, you can talk to one of us. But you can also talk to your research advisor as you let 'em know, like, Hey, I'm applying here. What, what did we do that you think would be great? And they would be an excellent resource for you.

Megan Riksen:

So that's really good advice. Yeah. Awesome. All right, well I think we have covered the whole gamut of things here today. So we're gonna leave you there. We know we've mentioned the show notes many times, but please go and connect to all of these great resources. And we thank you so much to everyone who listened today, and we hope you tune into a future episode soon.