Author: piper.138

OSU Bucket List

As a freshman, I made it my personal mission to explore campus. New to OSU, I was still making friends and quickly learned sometimes I’d just have to be comfortable making plans with myself. Thus, between classes to clear my mind I’d visit every cool spot, museum, hidden gem, garden, gallery, and art piece I could find. Having ventured into most academic building at least once, I discovered a lot of interesting views and study spaces I’d never heard about before.

It is now my senior year, and I had just a few more items to cross off my list. So, on a fall day that was just too beautiful to be inside, I met my goal!

Virtual Event Engagement

One benefit to the increased use of virtual mediums is that a wider range of events and hosts are available to meet with and learn from. I’ve been taking advantage of such opportunities by attending a wide range of sessions from those designed to learn more about a company or personal branding to a conference on neuroimaging by NINDS. You never know what special moments may arise when you take the time to enter new circles.

For example, at a casual chat with an alumni working at Syneos Health today, I was challenged to think of what the experience I give others is (my brand). Just then, a higher-up at my former job answered, “engaged!” He told of how I was present, listening, and participating at many Career Success events and always looking to self-improve. In the midst of a stressful week, this gave me the inspiration I needed to hear. Self-doubt can be our own worst enemy, and while being humble is important, this simple reminder that I am still trying lifted my perspective.

A – Academic Enrichment

Nature? Nurture? Both

Neurosexism as the New Sexism

This semester I am in two classes that are both currently discussing gender differences and sexual differentiation. In my Psychology of Gender course, I have been reading about the ways in which gender differences disappear when a study accounts for things such as priming. The message is that even unconscious attitudes lead to differential treatment which in turn shapes our reality. In my Hormones & Behavior neuroscience course, we have been talking about the organizational and activational effects of androgrens and estrogens. The takeaway has been that males and females are biologically fundamentally different in some way. For example, in one I learned about how differences in mental rotation task performance depends on testosterone and in the other that these differences disappear when you don’t frame it as a gendered task. By checking a box for geographic region instead of gender, a different identity was primed and men and women performed similarly.

Curious about these discrepancies, I attended office hours with both professors to gain their perspective on the matter. The lesson that was reinforced from this experience for me is to be critical of every finding as nobody is without bias. If you go looking for gender differences, you will find them. If you go looking for no gender differences, you won’t find them. Part of the issue is publication bias in which science is biased towards positive results and less interested in null findings. It’s less interesting to say, “Aha! We found nothing!” than, “Look, there’s this small but significant difference in the hippocampal volume that correlates to a difference!” However, that is certainly not to say that objective variations do exist. It is a fact to say men and women behave differently, but it is wrong to assume that it is entirely due to nature or nurture.

A rule of thumb when dealing with people is, if the answer seems simple, it’s probably not the whole story. A fascinating body of work has come to show that the way baby boys and girls are treated differs very early on, even before birth. So, when reading a finding, don’t forget to ask yourself, “okay, this exists, but why?”

My Mentor

When I signed up for the Match 100 program, which matches OSU alumni volunteers with student applicants (two years ago!) I had high hopes, but wouldn’t have expected my pairing to be so fruitful. I participated in this program for the duration of my junior year, and while my assigned mentor may not have appeared compatible on paper, she has been a blessing in my life.

My mentor earned her PhD in chemistry from Ohio State. I am a psychology student, also interested in research, but in a very different field. I wondered, how will this work? It turns out, the type of mentorship I needed was not industry insights but career navigation and confidence building. She was just the woman for the job. Together, we found joint interests and topics, and have since continued to meet up once a month.

While I thank her often, to express my gratitude at the official end of the program, I mailed her a letter and art piece (dog and plant themed of course). She was so touched she wrote back about how I changed her perspective of the program (her previous mentee wasn’t as engaged). I really do think I’ve made a lifelong friend. (Pics from our latest impromptu visit at the Chadwick Arboretum.)

Follow up: Over the summer I was contacted by the head of the Match 100 program to see if I would be willing to be a part of an informal video interview to share my experience and give tips for success to this year’s group of mentees! It was really nice to give back and I think when I become established in my career I will sign up to be a mentor myself.

Digital Art: Project 1

Technology and the Collective Unconscious

The Collective Unconscious, as first proposed by psychologist Carl Jung, is fundamentally based upon the idea of innate, universal knowledge. However, the availability of information has been vastly expanded since the conception of the Internet. Sharing in the unspoken meaning made available by tech has never been easier. My digital art piece was developed to generate a sense of both peace and foreboding to represent both how comfortable we are living in this landscape while being unaware of its effects. Research has shown people to be poor judges of truth. They fall prey to unconscious biases, and wrap themselves in a ‘media bubble.’ I hope my work will raise awareness to our individual involvement in this much larger world so to question the pervasiveness of media and technology, against the backdrop of passivity. To do this I depicted a person floating in a glass light bulb (representing their thoughts and bubble). The oxygen mask is to show how they live and breathe through the medium of the world at large, the environment made up of tech and social networks.

Note: This is my original work, reproductions are prohibited.

New Autumn Semester

Sometimes life gets away from you and you’re either so busy or so living in the moment you look back and realize, “I haven’t posted in three months!” I’m now five weeks into my final semester at Ohio State and it looks very different than I ever would have imagined. All of my classes are online, asynchronous, and it’s my duty to be more coordinated than ever. While I’m known to be organized, adapting to the online format has presented a real challenge for me. However, I’m determined to use this stage of my life to become stronger with each challenge and self-reflection earned.

For instance, my conviction to be in community and service with others has been renewed as I lean on my support network and use my experience to better mentor others. To this point, I cannot express how much joy the incoming class of Humanities Scholars have brought me. They are an inclusive, lively bunch that were all too eager to bring me into their esteem. As an upperclassman, I was able to give them advice and reassurance before they even came to campus. (One took to calling me the guardian angel of the chat.)

Their enthusiasm motivated me to go above and beyond in spearheading programming for scholars this fall. My Communications Committee created member spotlights on Instagram, a campus scavenger hunt series, dorm decoration highlights, social GroupMe’s, food tours, and more. It is great to see people so creative and flexible in designing new programming. We are especially excited that all of our promotional material paid off in getting 60 new members registered for BuckeyeThon, which is currently the top fundraising team of the university!

In summation, this semester has been trying in new ways, and some days I don’t succeed, but we are at least doing our best to be a bit more gracious towards ourselves and others.

Freshman doing my scavenger hunt, featuring the Whispering Wall.

ASC National Career Trek: Washington, D.C.

I was looking forward to visiting all the acronyms- NIH, NINDS, NIMH, DEA, IDA, etc.- but news of the COVID-19 pandemic escalated and our trip was ended before it even began for our safety. However, that was after our plane had already touched down! In that time I had visited a few museums and friends, making it the best 36 hour trip ever (and thankfully nobody from our group got sick). The following week I did my best to salvage the trip by reaching out to the contacts I had been given to conduct informational interviews.

Working from Home

Zoom Meetings

With the switch to the rest of the Spring 2020 semester being online, my Humanities Leadership Council and lab meetings moved to the streaming platform Zoom. While not being able to converse in person was at first a bit isolating, we soon adapted, determined to support the rest of our scholars group or lab functions. We planned events such as Netflix watch parties for relevant documentaries, linked virtual museum tours, and engaged more on social media platforms. It is now July but this format has continued to persist. I have done my best to apply the psychological principles I have learned to keep my days structured and mind and body healthy. I feel blessed to have been able to continue working when so many have lost jobs.

G – Global Engagement

Learning French

I began learning French in 8th grade. It was fun performing skits, being called Victoire by class friends, and beginning to learn about the culture. I continued to take French in high school and in the spring of my sophomore year I had the mind blowing opportunity to travel with the language department to Spain and France. It was a life changing experience, and while I may have been relatively young, the impression was certainly not lost on me. In fact, I believe that being immersed in a country and lifestyle different from the one I had grown up in shaped my worldview during a critical period. For instance, I was deeply humbled by the feeling of being in Spain with limited knowledge of Spanish. I kept a digital journal of all the things I saw, felt, and learned each day. Ever since I have deeply desired to continue to travel and to ‘know and engage the world.’

What I didn’t quite expect was to fall in love with Spain. So, for my senior year instead of taking a study hall, I signed up for Spanish 1. I didn’t mind being a senior in a class of all freshman. Upon entering college, I returned to French, completing courses through the 1103 sequence. It is at Ohio State that I came to appreciate the French speaking cultures around the world, not just that in France. Flash forward a year and I happened to see my former professeur on campus, so of course I had to say hello. My French had become rusty from disuse, but we held a conversation and as we parted he said, “Ya know, I was wondering what was missing from my class this semester and it was you. You were such a great student.”

So, while that moment has stuck with me as I try to act mindfully and be present in my courses, what caught my heart even more was conversing with a doctoral student on campus. We both happened to be standing in a give-away line and somehow started talking. She said she had moved here recently to follow her husband and was working on her English. In that time I had learned so much more about her background than I could’ve hoped for and shared what useful bits I had such as when to plant flowers in Ohio, brands of coats for winter, and how to describe the green of the South Oval. I am thankful for our knowledge of languages as it allowed us to fill in each other’s gaps.

O – Original Inquiry

The Weapons Effect: Qualtrics Survey

I had the pleasure of being selected to work with Dr. Brad Bushman [1] to create a standardized collection of images for the testing of the weapons effect [2]. Dr. Bushman recognized a potential need in the social psychology community for a validated image bank for the purpose of testing this effect in other labs. My first job was to collect images from the internet of hand guns, hair dryers, and hand drills. The last two were chosen as items that are visually similar to a gun but lack violent associations. I then created image pairings that were most visually similar so that the collection was reduced to 30 pictures, 10 for each item.

Next, I used Photoshop to remove all branding, make photos black and white, even contrast, standardize sizing and finalize visual similarities. After this step I was ready to begin building the survey by which images would be rated by participants on a variety of scales. I was excited to apply the knowledge I had gained from my research methods courses, using it to select the most appropriate question type for each inquiry and carefully choose wording. I learned a lot about Qualtrics and the flow of internet surveys from this experience.

First, I was commended for my suggested revision to the consent form, which clarified that participants will view graphic images but can stop the survey at any time. The next survey block collected demographic information, which I crafted to send participants to different pages based on whether we had met our quota for their characteristics. There were two blocks of image related questions, one for the photos I had made for the weapons effect and for the miniMAM, which is a validated measure to gauge individual differences in arousal, aversion, and reactance to positive/negative graphics. Since we decided to use similar scales and dimensions for the rating of the weapons effect image bank, the mimMAM will help in the analysis by providing a validated comparison group. Lastly, the guns attitudes scale was presented.

I was given a great degree of independence on this project so long as I crafted the survey to meet the goals of my PIs. Thus, I learned how to implement concepts into usable software. However, it was not always easy to know how to get what I wanted to happen in Qualtrics. I spent time exploring options and playing around in the program, asking questions of more experienced researchers, and even calling the Qualtrics support line when needed. I also grew from being a part of an ongoing critique as I was able to communicate professionally, receive feedback, justify my decisions, and connect with a virtual team. It was insightful to be a part of this project from start to finish. It is so excited to see the steps taken to transform an IRB protocol submission document into reality.

[1] https://u.osu.edu/bushman.20/

[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/get-psyched/201301/the-weapons-effect