For those who are reading about my project for this first time, hello! My name is Annie English, and I am currently working on an Honors in the Major project where I am investigating perceptions of juvenile delinquency based on music preference. Currently, I am finalizing the formal design strategy for my project and am getting ready to produce a final vignette questionnaire. I will use the funding I have received from an IDEA Grant (the David B. Ford Undergraduate Research Award) to release my survey on a reliable survey platform in order to obtain a higher quality set of data.
As I’ve moved further through my research this summer, I am particularly excited to develop my networking skills. In the last few weeks, I have been lucky enough to speak with several people (peers, professionals, family, etc.) about my project. In these conversations, I have been connected with others in my field, received wonderful advice, and been encouraged by individuals who I admire. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy or take advantage of networking opportunities while doing this project, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the impact it has had on the confidence I have in my ability to do a good job. Additionally, I am looking forward to further developing my overall research conduction skills and discipline. In all honesty, I knew that doing an honor’s thesis would be hard work, but I did not predict the slowness of the summer to have such an impact on the force with which I need to take on this project. Reflecting on this, I have decided to hold myself more accountable when it comes to completing tasks related to my research. Though it can be difficult to dedicate a large amount of time and energy towards my project during the summer, when most other areas in my life are relatively slow and low intensity, I appreciate the challenge as I know this experience will help me become a more disciplined student and future scholar.
In doing this project, I feel I have pulled the most from my previous experiences as a UROP leader. This past school year (2024-2025), I had the privilege of leading a classroom of students participating as research mentees in the UROP program. One of the many wonderful things about this role was listening to each student’s experience and realizing how different research can look in different contexts. This has proved useful to me in my current work because I can remember different examples of situations or tasks that my students would discuss with me, and I can use their experiences as examples of what to do (or what not to do) in my own process.
At this point in my project, I feel as though my greatest area for improvement is creating a healthy balance within my workload. I tend to have weeks where I spend a great amount of time working on my design strategy, literature review, or survey write-up. Other weeks, I will not put nearly as much work in. This tends to affect the consistency of progress that I am making as well as the balance that I need in my day-to-day life. Moving forward, as I mentioned above, I am holding myself more accountable to planning my workload and task management more efficiently for the greater good of my project timeline as well as my personal well-being.
I look forward to finally uploading my survey in the coming months and being able to start working with real data!
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