Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program

Spring 2016

Undergraduate students: please pick your top three choices from the following list of graduate mentors and projects. As part of your letter of interest, please name the graduate mentor and provide a brief essay as to why you have picked those three.

Graduate Mentor / Department / Project
Kylee Britzman / Political Science / My dissertation project examines patterns of political information and changing levels of political knowledge through online social networking websites like Facebook. I specifically compare how individuals who rely primarily on Facebook to get their news and learn about current events compare to individuals who only use Facebook as a secondary source and instead rely primarily on traditional news outlets like newspapers and television. Student researcher will participate in both qualitative and quantitative aspects of survey research and in-depth interviews being conducted, including working with large survey datasets, and facilitation and transcription of interviews.
Jeanne Brunner / Educational Psychology / My dissertation project focuses on supporting elementary teachers to teach the nature of science. Data sources for this research include measuring teachers’ practice, teachers’ views of nature of science, and students’ learning of nature of science. Undergraduate student researcher will assist with data management, coding qualitative and quantitative data, and data analysis.
Sarai Coba Rodriguez / Human and Community Development / This project involves working with low-income Latina mothers of preschoolers in a Head Start program to explore parental involvement and its influence on school readiness. The undergraduate apprentice will have hands-on training in employing qualitative research to address the social issue of school readiness and parental involvement and translating research into practice. More specifically, the student will assist in constructing literature reviews, transcribing and coding interviews and focus groups, analyzing data, and preparing workshop and conference materials.
Emily DiFilippo / Spanish Literature and Culture / My project explores disability as a divergence from concepts of “normalcy” in the literary and cultural production of contemporary Spain, and draws from a variety of sources, including traditional literary production as well as graphic novels, film, and cultural artifacts such as periodicals, websites and other print materials.Student researcher will help convert and organize archival materials, help catalog files for bibliography, as well as research/identify other source material from both digital and UIUC library archives.
Katherine Flowers / English/Writing Studies / In my dissertation, “Local Language Policy: Shifting Scales in the English Only Movement,” I argue that the local scale is increasingly important to people’s legal and political perspectives on language, but that it is also a flexible, contested concept that is always ideologically and materially linked to other scales. I am particularly interested in how people decide (and dispute) what it means for people, policies, and languages to be local in relation to nationalism and globalization. The undergraduate researcher will gain experience with multiple phases of the research process. This opportunity would be most fruitful for a student interested in English, writing studies, discourse analysis, and/or sociolinguistics, but also valuable for students in history, communication, anthropology, political science, pre-law, or related fields.
Amelia Kimball / Linguistics / My project investigates memory for speech and will consist of several experiments in which memory for the details of a spoken word or sentence are tested. Participants in the experiments will hear short clips of speech, and be asked to remember them after a short time delay. This project involves: designing and recording speech stimuli in a recording booth, building experiments in an online survey format (such as Survey Monkey or Qualtrics), collecting and cleaning data that is output by the survey program, creating figures of results, conducting statistical analyses of the data, and writing up the results.
Quinn Lewis / Geography and GIS / As a physical geographer I work in an interdisciplinary environment that includes geologists, ecologists, and civil engineers, which will expose the undergraduate to a diverse set of perspectives on research. The project itself examines flow mixing at stream confluences – locations in river systems where two streams combine to form a single stream. Stream confluences are hotspots for mixing of water, sediment, and pollution in river systems. The undergraduate student will be involved both in data collection and data analysis components of the research, learn how to operate research equipment, successfully collect and help analyze high quality data in the field, and work as a member of a research team. The student will also engage with published literature to become familiar with the conceptual context of the research.
Coral Lumbley / English / My dissertation will examine how Welsh and Anglo-Norman writers of the early Middle English period engage with the Norman imperialist project in twelfth-century Britain and beyond. Using historiographic, ethnographic, and romantic texts from the twelfth-century, I will explore the ongoing tension between Welsh desire for free cultural expression and political independence and English colonial fantasy in medieval Britain.
The undergraduate researcherwill gain valuable experience working with modern libraries, searching for hard copies of texts that may or may not be readily available. S/he will also: conduct and appraise electronic journal sources; help collect digital facsimiles of pertinent medieval manuscripts; develop an organized bibliography. Particularly suited to students interested in formations of ethnic identity, mechanisms of empire-building, as well as students interested in issues of translation or languages besides English.
Ishva Minefee / Business / This project integrates international business and sociology to understand how social movement organizations pressure multinational corporations to change controversial practices. Specifically, the undergraduate apprentice and I will examine the recent anti-soda campaign launched against Coca-Cola due to the sugar content in many of its drinks. The apprentice will receive hands-on training in the analysis of visual (i.e., film) and textual rhetoric as well as writing for academic publication. The project entails an opportunity for the apprentice to receive co-authorship on the final manuscript.
Ruchi Singh / Economics / As part of my dissertation, I plan to analyze natural disasters (like hurricanes, wildfires, tsunamis, volcano eruptions etc.) and the associated risks in the US. Student researcher will help in literature review, cleaning, and initial analysis of data.