I have been involved in extracurricular research during my final two years at TRU. I have always been curious and wanting to develop an in-depth understanding of anything that piques my interest. Outside of formal research courses, I was lucky enough to have my research proposal regarding the need for improvements to men’s health programs approved for the UREAP scholarship. During the final year of my undergraduate degree, I took a work-study position with TRU-PLAR researching ways to improve the PLAR program and was hired as a research assistant.
UREAP gave me the opportunity to design and implement my own mixed-methods research project, in which I used both the skills I had learned about in class, and improvisation- I used printed survey forms and did my calculations and analysis with pen and paper after they had been collected. At that point, I was still tech-shy, and had no experience with Excel or Survey Monkey. Later, while working with TRU’s PLAR team, I have learned that it is more efficient and organized to utilize online programs such as Excel and Survey Monkey and will be using these more modern methods in the future.
Other projects included in my research portfolio include coursework regarding the service dog industry and thoughts based on existing research into how to resolve industry challenges while also improving animal welfare. I also include examples of my contributions to ongoing TRU- PLAR research, my beginning tasks as a research assistant, and independent projects. Skills that I have developed from this experiences include information seeking, data collection, survey and questionnaire creation and evaluation, qualitative data analysis, coding and tagging, graph-making (and other visual representations), literature reviews, data synthesis, and proposal writing.