URSP Student Melissa Joe Researches College Students and the Perceptions of the Dream Act

Last semester I started to do research on immigration reform under my mentor, Professor Gring-Pemble, and I was really interested in this field because it is something I find very intriguing. As I was doing this research I started to notice that there wasn’t any articles that talked about how college students felt about the DREAM Act. I found this unnerving, so I decided to fill in this gap of knowledge by creating a survey to gauge the perceptions of college students on the DREAM Act. This research isn’t really related to my major or what I want to do career-wise, but designing and conducting my own research project is a valuable skill to have and will help me with future endeavors. This project has taught me all the hard work that goes into just creating and being able to distribute a survey.

     Since I have started working on this project what I do each week varies according to my schedule. So far my weeks have consisted of researching information on the DREAM Act, creating and perfecting my survey, and applying for IRBs approval of my survey. Once I have approval to distribute my survey, my weeks will consist of analyzing data and working on an article to record my findings. This week I learned about how to fill out an application for IRBs approval of my survey. It had many components to it, including an ethics training course, and I learned a lot from both filling out the application and completing the ethics training. I learned a lot about to how to ethically distribute my survey and the steps I would need to take depending on who’s taking my survey.