Tuesday, September 26, 2017

OSCAR Student Ilana Simkol Works on the FaBULIS Nutrition Project

Hi, I’m Ilana Simkol a senior majoring in Community Health. I wanted to work on the FaBULIS Nutrition Summer Team Project since I have always been interested in nutrition. My interest with nutrition first started when I began competitive gymnastics. As a gymnast, I had to be aware of what kinds of foods I ate. Also, this nutrition summer team project focused on consumer behavior and actual dietary intake that a person could consume. I realized that this research topic could relate to the time I worked at a restaurant since I remember being intrigued by what each customer’s definition of “healthy” was. I also wanted to work on this summer team project because I was interested in doing research after taking my research methods class in an earlier semester.

Long-term, I want to do something in the public health field and research has been an interest of mine. I can use this summer team project research as a starter and stepping stone as I get more involved in research. The research methods class I took was an eye-opener to the research process and this summer team project got me more interested in research.

During the weeks, my partner and I first started conducting a literature review where we would look at different articles to find gaps and to make sure our research question was not already answered or looked at too many times, this would lead us to work on our Annotated Bibliography. We then, would narrow our research question down and begin to look at the NHANES data and begin the coding process. As we would code, we would begin to write the research paper.  We would also meet with our mentor to discuss our progress so far and ask any questions that we had.


One thing that I learned about this summer is how patient you need to be with research. Research takes time and dedication, a process, which cannot be rushed and needs your complete concentration since there is a lot that needs to be done.