URHS
Undergraduate research and honors scholar program
Primary components
Course Based Research
Standard lecture or laboratory-based courses have not been counted for fulfillment of this requirement, and each had novel inquiry and discovery, development of advanced skills in research, creativity, and scholarship, and are substantially beyond writing literature reviews or projects where outcomes are known prior to investigation.
Non-Course Based Research
Non-course based research components required research, creativity, scholarship, and had to meet the following requirements:
-At least 135 hours spent on research, creativity, and scholarship activity
-Support and mentorship from faculty member with regular advising meetings
-Increasing independence, self-direction, and multi-semester progress towards goal
Research Presentation
Presentation of research must be at a public venue. Below are the experiences I was able to be a part of, many of which resulted in research presentations. My proudest presentations can be found by clicking the link below titled “Research Posters.”
Highlighted experiences
Research Course Experiences
As a student interested in research as a career, I took every possible course I could find in this area and program. I began this program with a research course in Dance, studying performance anxiety and current methods of training professional dancers to overcome impasse and visible mistakes on stage.
My psychology research began with the Eastern Virginia Medical School Apprenticeship program, where I studied rTMS therapy as a treatment for expediting mood symptom reduction in patients with severe anxiety or depression (or both).
Following my apprenticeship, I looked for coursework that would teach me how to design my own projects, and took research methods, and quantitative statistics through the psychology department. I thoroughly enjoyed these courses, and succeeded even as a majority of my peers had to retake the course.
My interests in Human Cognition and Sensation and Perception grew following the semesters in which I was able to take the courses. Passion for the area grew, and I was able to enroll in supervised research under Dr. Ivan K. Ash in his Human Cognition Lab. I became a lab assistant for work on coding for impasse in insight problem solving in working memory, and assisted in the projects for graduate students in the lab.
My final course component was the Honors Program in Psychology. I applied for, and gained acceptance into a competitive Honors Program in Psychology, where I prepared a thesis proposal, defense, and experiment. Results of this experiment would go on to be presented at the Undergraduate Research Symposium.
Extracurricular Experiences
The first opportunity to become involved in research outside of coursework was for the Human Cognition Lab under supervision by Dr. Ivan K. Ash. I thrived as I gained opportunities to assist the graduate students as they worked on their studies of creative problem solving in working memory. I volunteered for many hours, and learned to code for Think Aloud Protocol through video recordings, and read articles to keep the lab up to date with current methods.
Following additional coursework in supervised research, I applied for the Research and Innovation Grant through Perry Honors College. I gained funding to begin a pilot-experiment and evaluate if an eye-tracking program could be created to focus on eye-fixations as a measure of impasse during problem solving. (Spoiler, it can).
Successful completion of the Research and Innovation Grant led me to apply for a second highly competitive grant, the Research & Creativity Grant. This grant was successful and allowed for the lab to continue preparing for experimentation on evaluating the validity of eye-tracking as a measure of impasse. I completed a proposal, pilot experiment, internal review board evaluation, basic data collection, and I set up the experiment in the internal psychology research participant database. Due to COVID-19, the experiment was haulted and could not be completed as students were evacuated off campus and the experiment couldn’t be done remotely. The experiment had been promised an evaluation for the University Research Journal and was being prepared for conference presentations,
About URHS
This program provides hands-on and inquiry-based experiences to hone critical thinking, communication, and quantitative skills in the program of student’s choice. The program connects students in the University’s active research community and offers grants for authentic research experiences that are independently run by students.