Hi everyone, my name is Angelina Davis and I am a second year Human Development & Family Sciences major. Being a “Global Scholar” to me means learning more about the world around me, whether this is locally or some place abroad. It is easy to go through each day without thinking about cultures and communities that exist all around me, and being in Global Scholars has already helped me to pay more attention to the different people, studies, foods, and events that exist here at FSU. Although I initially wanted to go abroad, I am also able to examine the community near me (either Tallahassee or my hometown Ocala) with the tools we have learned in class. Research is something that is very important to me, and I am excited to explore it more with a global perspective – for my experience this summer this means observing how some existing studies incorporate globalism into their own work.
This summer, my planned experience is to participate in a DIS which is a Directed Individual Study studying early Alzheimer’s predictors. The lab I will be working with examines existing scholarly articles and journals to find common predictors of Alzheimer’s disease; these findings will be used to generate a model showcasing results. I will be coding for certain predictors that appear as I navigate through texts. On the side, I am pretty sure that I will be keeping an Excel spreadsheet to track characteristics of the article. Some of the things I will be making note of are the country/region of the study, sample size descriptors (race, age, ethnicity), author location, and predictor identified (biological VS lifestyle). This methodology is still being refined but my hope is to identify how applicable the research articles are to the rest of the world. As we have learned in class, having a global perspective in research helps translate results to the entire population rather than just a select group.
I am also wanting to interview my research mentor about her opinions on the application of her research to different parts of the world and whether she thinks that Alzheimer’s research is too narrow & whether it has the opportunity to be expanded farther in the world. I also would like to explore why other regions may not be studying Alzheimer’s predictors, and look at the difference in predictors in the United States versus other countries. I chose this DIS because of my strong interest in health & wellness research; as a pre-health STEM major I knew I wanted to go into something relating back to the wellbeing of others. I also think that this is an interesting way to apply a global perspective. Although I am not traveling abroad, I feel that this experience will be just as impactful and will alter the way that I conduct/participate in future research. I hope to pay more attention to where the research that I am contributing to in the future mainly comes from and see if there is a way to bridge those gaps.
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