I have lots of little updates for you all this week including some random pictures! This week has been an entire whirlwind with the end of homeworks, start of exams, setting up new apartment/utilities/movers, and packing things up here. The first two pictures here are from Landshark which is a fun and good beachside restaurant in Daytona; my friends and I go there fairly often. Their nachos and fish tacos are GREAT. If you don’t/can’t drink, you can even get a lot of their blended drinks without alcohol. The mango coconut slushie is my FAVORITE. The third picture is the final result from my boyfriend and I’s art date at Art Rageous in Port Orange. See previous posts for details, but I think this turned out great. The last picture is of the SLEW of poster printing that I helped with at the Office of Undergraduate Research. For all of you that do not know, I am the Graduate Assistant at OUR, and we recently hosted our Spring research symposium which is called Discovery Day. This year yielded over 200 presenters and 1500 guests!! Which also resulted in printed posters stacking up very quickly in the office haha…..
This past summer, I had the privilege to work on an undergraduate research project with my faculty mentor. I was accepted to the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows (SURF) program offered by the undergraduate research department. I spent the spring 2020 semester (pre-covid) designing my research and a plan for data collection. I conducted my research on Women in Aviation and factors that impact minority female students enrolled in aviation higher degree.
2020 SURF Receipients
During the summer and into the spring semester, I was conducting interviews on zoom from a remote site (due to the pandemic). These participants identified themselves as a minority female and I was able to have meaningful conversations with them in order to explore their needs and wants in order to achieve success in a very homogenous industry. The entire process almost took up a year but this past month, I was able to present my research at the Global Virtual Conference on Diversity in Aviation, Aerospace and STEM, hosted by Ohio State University. The paper was later published on UAA (University Aviation Association) for the CARI (Collegiate Aviation Review International) journal. In addition to the publication, I will be presenting at the virtual Student Research Symposium (ERAU) this fall.
It was such a meaningful opportunity to be able to conduct my own research, present it in front of people and be able to publish a research paper. I have learned so much from the experience and all the time I spent working on this project was well worth it at the end.
I always knew that our university had great research programs, but as a pilot, all those opportunities felt distant from me as I assumed they were more for the engineering students. However, from my own research experience, I found out these research programs extended to aeronautics, business, homeland security and many more majors offered at our school. It was a refreshing experience to see the work of student researchers from a diverse pool of studies.
For anyone who is interested in conducting their own research (you can also do it in a group), I would highly recommend contacting our undergraduate research department to find out more about all the opportunities they have to offer. They will help you find anything from a good research topic, a mentor, a scholarship, to conference opportunities. The experience you will gain from conducting a research at a higher degree institution is something you will not obtain from your average classroom setting.
