During my senior year of high school I took a class called Honors Advanced Science Seminar, which was a part of my MedTrack program requirements. In this class I learned about scientific research and the process of how to create research projects. The final project for this class was a group mock research grant proposal and presentation. The project mimicked how scientific research is formed, proposed, and eventually funded. My group began by identifying a topic that we were interested in. We chose to look at how social media affects children’s self-esteem because of the prevalence of social media use by the youth today. Then, we had to compile thirty research articles that pertained to our topic. My group members and I each found five articles that we read and became experts on. We spent many class periods combining our knowledge and connecting our ideas. Then we wrote a literature review that compiled our research on the topic. After the literature review, we explored holes in the current research that has been done on the effects of social media. We found that there was not a lot of research showing the effects that social media has on young children. We thought that this would be an important topic to research because social media is heavily used by young children. Once we chose our research question, we began formulating our experimental design. After developing our experiment, we created a presentation that mimicked a grant proposal presentation. Our project culminated at the MedTrack Senior Mock Grant Proposal Conference where we presented our project to a panel of judges from the MedTrack Advisory Board.
This project was a hands-on experience of the process of creating scientific research. This project, and the Honors Advanced Science Seminar class overall, piqued my interest in research. With the foundation that I have received through this project and this class I hope to be able to participate in scientific research as an undergraduate student at The Ohio State University.