In the past week I've been spending a lot of time wrapping up big projects, and for some, just getting started! So here are some of the things I'm working on in these final weeks of the semester.
For my statistics class, my group gave our presentation on our survey about students' substance use during the pandemic. Now we're finishing up writing the paper that we'll submit with our findings! Then all that's left for math is the final exam, which I'm feeling pretty unprepared for. I'll plan to spend some time this week studying and putting my notes together, since it's an open book exam!
In my gender studies class, my group will give our presentation about queer coding in the media on this coming Tuesday. Although I wish I had more time to explore these topics, it's been interesting to learn about queer coding in horror specifically, since it's my favorite genre of movies and TV! We also got to hear the other groups from our class present on Thursday, which was a really cool way to learn about the projects they've been working on. We also had the choice between taking a timed or take-home exam for this class, and I decided to take the timed exam during the final exam period.
I've also finally been able to start collecting data for my practicum study! I ran into some issues using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to collect data at first, since I'm very new to using it. I got some advice from my professors and was able to start collecting data. In one day I had over 400 responses come in! I was a little bit shocked at how quickly I met my goal. I wasn't able to collect as many responses as I had originally hoped because of unexpected fees, but I'm very happy with the number I collected.
I've gotten to do some early analysis of my data and have been finding some really interesting relationships already! Most of my scales have a high level of reliability, which was something I was a bit nervous about given that I used some original and adapted scales. I was also able to see some significant correlations already between personality traits and COVID-19 behavior and environmental behavior!
For the end of this semester, I'll be writing an outline of the final paper I'll continue to work on with my advisor over the summer. At the moment I'm focusing on cleaning and scoring my data, and I'm really excited to see the project start to take shape!