Global Scholars: Blog 3
By: Grace Redmond
My summer experience began with me walking into a room full of people who all seem to know exactly what they are doing when I didn’t necessarily feel so sure, and that has been quietly humbling, but the experience has also been inspiring, challenging, and more eye-opening than I anticipated.
My Global Scholars capstone this summer is exploring a question that sits at the intersection of cognitive psychology and the workplace: how does an individual’s cognitive thinking style relate to their motivation and engagement in intellectually demanding work? It sounds academic when I put it that way, but the reason I care about it is personal. Throughout my academic career I have struggled with staying engaged and motivated on demanding projects. I have had to build rigid routines just to keep my brain working the way I want it to. That lived experience made me curious not just about my own mind, but about what actually drives genuine intellectual engagement in other people, with questions like “What “wakes” the brain up? What makes someone lean in rather than check out?” These questions fascinate me, and this summer I finally have the tools and the community to begin pursuing them seriously.
The stakeholders connected to this research are broader than I had initially thought. The most direct are workers/employees themselves, or anyone navigating cognitively demanding tasks in a professional environment (which in an increasingly automated and AI-driven economy means nearly everyone). Employers and organizational leaders are deeply invested too, as engagement and motivation have direct consequences for performance, retention, and well-being. Indirectly, this research touches policymakers thinking about workforce development, educators designing training programs, and the growing field of people analytics, which relies on exactly this kind of behavioral insight to make organizational decisions. Even the students in my REU cohort are stakeholders, as we are all here precisely because we are being asked to engage deeply with unfamiliar, cognitively demanding material, and the questions I am studying applies directly to our own experience this summer.
The existing research on motivation and cognitive engagement is very interesting, but not so consistent. Much of it centers on traditional, stable work environments and draws heavily from Western, educated, and professional populations. What is often missing are the perspectives of people doing cognitively demanding work in non-traditional or technology-saturated contexts, this could be gig workers, researchers early in their training, or people navigating AI-assisted workflows for the first time. I have found a newfound interest this week in what cognitive behaviors we engage in now with AI when we are working on projects. The perspective I want to bring is one that takes individual cognitive differences seriously as a variable, not just an afterthought. Most engagement research treats motivation as something organizations do to employees, but I am more interested in what employees bring to the table cognitively, and how that shapes their experience for themselves and the entire organization.
The relationships I have built here at Syracuse in just the first week have already surprised me. My cohort is thoughtful, driven, and genuinely collaborative in a way I did not expect. My mentors too, are pushing me to think in ways I have never been asked to before by bringing to my attention ideas about data access, the unsolvable questions regarding ethics of research, and what it means to truly ask a good question. I fully intend to maintain these relationships beyond this summer. The people I have met here so far have brought me into conversations that make me feel very intellectually stimulated and truly excited to hear what they’re going to say next. I feel very grateful for this opportunity and everything I will learn from these people this summer.
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