My
project deals with understanding admission into higher-level educational
institutions and how it is impacted by claims these universities make and what
is interpreted by the prospective students. Since I plan to attend
medical school following the completion of my bachelor’s, I am intrigued to see
how the grueling application process affects applicants. Based on the preliminary results and how far
I get this semester, I hope to be able to continue this project in the future
as well.
Although my project in itself has not changed due to COVID-19, I have had to make many adjustments to my procedure as I am conducting interviews with human subjects for my data collection. Prior to the pandemic, I had intended on interviewing 20 first-year Mason students in person, however, due to the social distancing guidelines, I have had to move the interviews strictly through Zoom. In addition to the altered data collection steps, I have also had to adjust my plan of action in terms of outreach and finding volunteers to participate. Instead of being able to stand in the Johnson Center food court and hand out fliers in addition to emails which would have been much more efficient, I have had to limit the outreach to only emails. This has proven to be more difficult as I have not received as many responses as I would have with the original plans. With COVID-19, an average research day starts with me sending out a batch of emails advertising my research study to professors, requesting them to send the invitation forward to their students. If I were to receive any interested volunteers, we then find a suitable time for us to meet via Zoom to conduct the hour-long interview. Following this, the interview recordings are sent to be transcribed professionally in batches. The next steps of the project would be to receive the transcriptions back 1-2 days later. The files would be run through analytical coding software to annotate and tag the transcriptions in order to identify prominent patterns within the responses. As I am still in the data collection process, I have not yet analyzed the data and made any new discoveries as of yet.
