CSS Student Blogs

During yesterday’s Field Biology class, we went out to our field sites and marked the more significant locations in a GPS. We are writing a scientific report detailing our field work, and the coordinates of every trap, camera and sampling site is of relevance to the study. Additionally, in marking these locations, we got experience working a GPS unit, which in addition of being fun, I’m sure will come in handy in future backpacking trips! 

Our most recent Field Biology assignment consists on writing the results section of a scientific report. After having done all the field work and gathered all the necessary data, we were tasked with analyzing the data and writing up the results. Forestry is quite unrelated to my major (Psychology), but it is quite nice to get practice writing scientific reports, since I intend to pursue a PhD in investigative psychology. Once again, bio minor coming in useful! 

Today, the university hosted a graduate school workshop. Career services worked alongside the psychology, philosophy and mathematics department to give an overview of what the graduate school application process looks like, and share some insights about how best to do it. Career services shared their expertise in CV’s, resumes, cover letters and personal statements; the psychology department expanded on the personal statement and talked about the importance of reaching out to professors, having research experience and preparing with adequate time; finally, the philosophy and math departments focused on the two verbal and quantitative components of the GRE, respectively. In all, it was a pretty exhaustive overview, and definitely worth attending if you’re considering to apply to grad school in the future!

Yesterday I ran the first set of participants for the Sun Lab! Currently, the lab is running two studies (you can read more about them here: https://sun-lab.net/study-sign-up/), and yesterday I shadowed the Principal Investigator (and director of the lab, Dr. Sun) so I can start running participants later this week. I’m looking forward to start running participants myself again!

This semester, I’m working in the Sun Lab, a psychology research laboratory on campus.  We’re currently working on finalizing the preparations for two research studies in which we hope to start running participants next week! I can’t tell whether the psychology department hasn’t been very involved in research this last couple of years, or it is only I who hadn’t noticed because I didn’t actively seek out these opportunities, but whatever the case, it is exciting to see that interesting research is taking place on campus!