Hi y’all! For this week’s blog, I’m gonna write a bit about my experience doing research here at Amherst. Amherst has a comprehensive list of offerings in terms of research, including programs like SURF, Schupf, and Gregory Call. Here is a brief summary of the research I’ve participated in during my time here at Amherst!
1. SURF
SURF stands for the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. It is a STEM research opportunity for students in the summer after their first year or sophomore year. Students can apply to work with up to three professors for research, and if admitted to SURF, they will work in that professor’s lab with two to three other students for eight weeks. Students receive a stipend from the college for their work, as well as free housing and dining. Lots of students continue their SURF research into the school year and are working on professors’ future publications as 18-20 year olds.
I worked with Professor Correia (a statistics professor) on a project about racism in obstetrics and gynecology. The first half of the project was a narrative review of previous literature in the top obstetrics and gynecology journals in the past ten years to characterize how race and racism are discussed (or not discussed) in medicine. We used coding in R to create a search protocol and collect the articles, and then did data collection from the articles. The second half of the project was creating data art based on the data we had collected. Data art is a visceralization of data that takes a step beyond data visualization with the goal to rehumanize the data and connect it back to its source and community. Some people created visual art, but I created a data dance.
2. RA for Professor Hyman
This past year, during my junior year, I was Professor Hyman’s research assistant in the economics department. I worked on developing my statistical analysis skills and created figures for his paper on the effect of college counseling in the classroom on college enrollment using Stata (a kind of statistical software for data scientists). We also worked together on brainstorming how to study the impact of the Department of Education’s Title I program on long-term student outcomes.
3. RA for Professor Reyes
This summer, in addition to working with the admissions office, I am doing research with Professor Reyes in the economics department and helping her prep the racial capitalism course she is co-teaching in the spring. Some of my projects include designing an intro to econ module for the course, researching racial patriarchal capitalism, and creating a Zotero database for readings.
4. Thesis
Since doing research and admissions office work wasn’t enough, I am also starting my thesis this summer! I am writing an economics thesis throughout the next year with a culminating 50-page paper due at the end of my senior year. I am generally interested in writing about the interconnection between school funding and school segregation in K-12 schools.
That’s all for this week!
