Learning Opportunities within the Lab:
- Prepare for grad school: Our team leaders enjoy mentoring undergraduates. From discussing the research process, to helping students with their applications and personal statements—we seek to help students reach their academic and career goals. Many research assistants (RAs) have gone on to be successful in applying for graduate programs in the field of social psychology and beyond.
- Computer Skills: RAs have to opportunity to learn computer programming skills, data cleaning and coding in Excel, and develop proficiency in data collection platforms like Qualtrics and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
- Statistical analysis: RAs can learn techniques in data analysis, and statistical software programs like R and SPSS. Additionally, our RAs help prepare data for analysis by entering and coding participant responses and cleaning data files.
- Research Implementation: Our RAs run participants in online and in-person settings, in lab or even at elementary schools. Our experiments range from simple computer simulations to carefully timed interactions that involve deception. Our RAs work with undergraduates, children and parent participants.
- Research Methods: By engaging in the research process, students learn about research methods first-hand. RAs assist in all steps of the research process such as study development, stimuli construction, participant recruitment, study implementation, data collection, cleaning, coding and more.
- Writing skills: Our lab requires a research paper at the conclusion of the semester, which allows students to practice their empirical writing skills and receive constructive feedback. Additional opportunities for students to improve their writing include proofreading papers before they are submitted for publication, writing abstracts, and even writing a thesis paper about a study of their own design.
- Communication skills: Research is a collaborative process, and as such, students learn to work on a team and delegate tasks. We communicate frequently over email and slack. Additionally, students learn how to discuss research in a professional setting with graduate students, academic staff and the principal investigator.