by Aaron Butts
Stress was high, as always, in the weeks leading up to Capital’s Symposium of Undergraduate Research, which took place Wednesday, April 10. Months of hard work and preparation culminated in only a few hours of presentations and discussion. For some, the experience is better than others, but for all presenting their research, the symposium is very important.
For those that don’t know, or didn’t attend, the symposium is a day where students take research projects that they have been working on for at least a semester, and present it for criticism and praise from peers and faculty in every department. Most students are presenting a Capstone, or a project that is required by a department for graduation.
Kelsey Hutchinson is one of those students, presenting her senior year.
“This will be my honors capstone and my communications capstone,” Hutchinson said. “It is on public relations, and it’s looking at what people think about public relations as a field and how that is influenced by the motive of the organization doing public relations, and the dissemination methods they used.”
For Hutchinson, this project has been in the works for more than just a semester.
“I came up with the idea for my presentation in my social science research methods class two years ago in the spring of my sophomore year. Then I refined it and worked on IRB forms during my junior year. I spent most of last semester collecting and analyzing data as well as working on my paper, which ended up being 27 pages, so this is just a presentation on that paper.”
Senior Kourtney Selogy is also presenting her senior Capstone for political science in the form of a poster, rather than doing a 20-minute oral presentation.
“For the symposium, I had to do a poster for research methods two, which is my capstone, so I decided to do mine on media exposure on gender confidence levels in diverse political arenas,” Selogy said. “I had to study what gender bias does to both women and men.”
Unlike Hutchinson, Selogy has only recently started research.
“The experience was stressful, because I basically just started my capstone this semester, and I didn’t expect all the difficulties going through such as the IRB and getting my surveys out to certain classes, because some classes didn’t want to take the time to take the survey,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting all the work that went into it, I thought it would just be writing a paper.”
For a freshman entering the Cap Center, and seeing all of the pie charts and bar graphs must be daunting, or for some it can be exciting. Sophomore political science major Brian Perry is eager for when he will have to do his Capstone.
“It’ll be an interesting experience, I like this stuff a lot so I think I’ll be alright,” he said. “I think it’ll be a good opportunity. I like doing research, I like giving presentations so I think I’ll be fine with it.”
Selogy was not quite as excited as Perry.
“It’s daunting when you don’t know it’s coming,” Selogy said. “But if you’re a freshman or a sophomore and you know what you have to do, it’s a good idea to come here and learn about other people’s projects and what they did and say ‘Wow, I already know what I’m doing, I already know what I’m interested in. I’m going to keep this going all throughout my school years so that when it comes time for my capstone I’m ready.’”
Preparing one’s self for the symposium is the key to making it good and smooth.
“I took stats and research methods in my freshman and sophomore years and those really helped to prepare me for research since my project is experimental design which is more unusual in the communication department, but from taking the research methods class I really liked experimental and factorial designs,” Hutchinson said.
Hutchinson was also the recipient of two different awards at the convocation—outstanding senior woman and outstanding psychology student—and gave some advice for underclassmen who may be facing a research project in the future.
“I really recommend taking social science research methods because it will help you to do research in any type of discipline,” she said. “That class was a really great experience. Research can look overwhelming but having a nice plan early, and taking small chunks out of time, not trying to do it in two weeks but really start at the beginning of the semester and continue over the course of the semester.”
Now that the display easels have been taken down and the tables cleared away in the Cap Center, students can now breathe a sigh of relief in knowing that such a big project has been accomplished, and students who witnessed the tremendous research, who now see their own presentations on the horizon, can start preparing for future symposiums.
abutts@capital.edu
