Speaker 1: I'm so glad that you came across this video today because I'm going to be talking about something that is so near and dear to my heart, and that is my undergraduate research thesis. I studied salsa dancing with people who had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and if you think that sounds very weird, that's because it kind of was an odd idea. In this video, I'm going to talk about what a research thesis is and what it looks like in undergrad, as well as how I managed to pull off this project in just a year and a half. So, without further intro, I'll get into it. Welcome to GradLife Grind. If you're new to this channel, thank you for checking it out, and if you're already a subscriber, thanks for being back again. My name is Arielle, and I'm a PhD student in clinical psychology, and in this channel, I bring you information about the mental health field and talk about my journey as a PhD student. So what is a research thesis? In undergrad, a thesis typically looks like a report on a study that you've done yourself. However, since you're an undergrad, it's assumed that you don't have a ton of research experience. That being said, you usually work with a faculty member at your institution who has a research lab already, and in my undergraduate institution, as a psychology major in the honors program, I was required to do a thesis, and that meant finding a faculty member in the psychology department who already had a lab of their own, finding out what kind of work they do in their lab, and working on one of their projects, and maybe creating a mini project of my own within an existing study. That's the way that it's typically done because, like I said, you don't have a ton of research experience, and at least at my school, the undergrad research thesis, you only have a year and a half to do it, so you want to take on a mini project within a larger study so that you have the guidance of your faculty advisor and so forth. That was not exactly the case for me, but in general, once you find a faculty member, you talk to them about the projects they have going on in their lab, then you come up with a mini research idea of your own based on what they already have going on, and then you work together to carry out that project, and then you write a big report, which turns out to be your thesis. And the thesis is kind of formatted the way a scientific article would be, with an abstract and an introduction, a literature review, the methods of the study you did, the results of the study you did, and then a discussion section with future directions and limitations. If you haven't seen a scientific article, then comment, and I can do a video about what scientific articles look like and how to even read them. But in general, your thesis is kind of a big version of that. It's a lot longer than a typical research article because you're going a lot more in depth in the subject that you're studying. So that's typically what a research thesis looks like. At the undergraduate level, it's a lot more simple and straightforward. It's designed to just get you exposure to research and to scientific writing. Usually, master's students also have to do a thesis that's much more intense. And then if you're in a doctoral program like I am now, you do a dissertation, and that's kind of like a thesis on steroids. And some doctoral programs, you have to do a master's level thesis in the first two or three years of your program, and then you move on to a much bigger, badder dissertation. So when you're an undergrad, you're just getting a taste of what that may look like at the graduate level. So why did I have to do a thesis? Well, like I said, I was in the honors program for my school in undergrad, and apparently, something that I didn't know until I was pretty close to graduating was that if you're in the honors program, you also have to be honors in your major. So that meant I had to be general honors and a psychology honors student. And the psychology department required that honors students carry out this undergraduate research thesis. Now, what complicated it a little bit for me is that, like I said, you typically find a faculty member, and then you work on their own stuff, and you find a mini project that you can do within that. So if they're running a study on depression among adolescents, and they're already collecting data, you might say, hmm, one of the things we're collecting is social support. Maybe I'll look at the relationship between social support and adolescents who are experiencing depression. And you kind of find one little way to make the project your own, or you add something to the study. Now, what was hard for me is that I didn't really have the ability to start working with a faculty member at my undergrad institution, because I was already committed to a research lab outside of my undergrad institution. And if you want to hear more about my research experience, I did a video about how I was a research assistant during undergrad, and that experience really, really prepared me for graduate school. So when it came time to do my undergrad thesis, I couldn't really commit to working in a new faculty member's lab. So I ran into a problem where I couldn't be in two places at once. So what I asked my program was if I can do my thesis at the research lab at the hospital where I was already working. And they said that that doesn't typically happen, but if students want to do it that way, then it might take a little bit longer, but sure, you can do it. And I was like, great. Still, my program required me to find a faculty advisor at my university so that they can help me meet the requirements for the undergrad thesis that my school had. So I found a faculty member. She was incredible. I told her that I already had a research assistantship outside of school, and that I wanted to do my project there, and if she would help me. So she was totally down to do that. And that's what enabled me to actually carry this out, because I was able to have the partnership between my university and the hospital where I worked. Then the issue came of developing the research idea. What am I going to do my project on? So like I said, you typically figure out your project based on what your advisor is already doing. So I asked my research supervisor at the hospital what kind of project she has going on, how can I maybe find an idea within that. And when we were meeting about this, she noticed and her program coordinator noticed that I wasn't taking a huge interest in any of the projects that were currently happening, and I couldn't really see how I could make a piece of it my own the way that you would normally do. The lab that I worked at was a CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, program for people with psychosis, or people who deal with diagnoses like schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. So even though my research supervisor was working with a really interesting population and doing really interesting work, she noticed that something wasn't clicking for me. And so the research coordinator was in that meeting and she was like, listen, if you had unlimited resources and you could do any project you wanted, what would you do with the population that we have? And I was like, well, something that they didn't totally know about me was that on my spare time, I was a salsa dance instructor, I was on a salsa dance team. And that was something that I was really passionate about for most of my life. So I was like, well, if I had to run a study in whatever I wanted, then I would make the participants dance and see what happens. And like I said, I had really amazing people in my corner. So the research supervisor was like, oh my gosh, she jumped out of her chair and she's like, let's do it. Why not? And I was like, are you serious? And she was like, yeah, why, why not? Like, let's try it out. So we decided to develop this research idea to recruit participants who have schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and engage them in a salsa dance class taught by me. So that's how I developed my research thesis idea. Now, because I was going through this pretty tough process of doing a thesis, my program did something great where they developed a class that would walk us through the first semester of the thesis process, including coming up with the idea, reviewing the literature, finding your faculty advisor and so forth. And then for the next two semesters after that, you're completely on your own. It was considered independent study. So I would meet with my faculty advisor at school and I would also meet with my research advisor at the hospital where I already worked. And then I worked on the project for about a year on my own. So once I came up with my research idea, I was still in that first semester taking the class, developing my idea. And the professor of that course really doubted that I was going to be able to do such an ambitious project, also be working on it outside of school. And I was starting from scratch because I wasn't working on something that my advisor was already doing. And I was really determined to do this project because it was something that I was super passionate about. It integrated what I was already working on with people who had psychosis and it integrated my culture and something that I'm really passionate about, which is dance. So what came next was securing funding and it was really hard to get any type of research grant and I didn't need that much money, but I did want to pay my participants. So I ended up doing a GoFundMe and I got a few hundred dollars that would cover the cost of paying a few participants, I think between five and $10 for their participation. And I got started. So when you come up with a research project, the next thing you have to do is make a proposal and send it to the IRB, which is an ethics review board that makes sure that the project you're doing is ethical and treating your participants fairly and ethically. So that takes several months. I had to do that at the hospital instead of at my school because I was doing the whole project there. That introduced a lot of delays and it caused me to have to dial back my project and make it smaller and smaller and smaller because I had come up with this really ambitious idea where we were going to teach SALSA every single week for a few weeks and then see what the outcomes were and that was far too big for an undergraduate research idea. We ended up securing funding, IRB approval, recruiting participants, which was really tough, and carrying out a one-time SALSA class that was taught by me. And then we did some quantitative assessments, so we asked them about the class and their feedback, we asked them about their mood and how they were feeling, if they were socially anxious, and things like that. And we also did a kind of qualitative focus group type of interview where we just asked questions about how did it go for you, what did you like, what did you not like. And I won't get too far into the results, but in general people were really pleased with the class. They said that SALSA was something that they thought was really hard and then they found that it actually wasn't that hard, that the instructor, me, made it a little bit easier. They found that their mood was a little bit better, they found that they would want to maybe try SALSA in the future, and almost all the participants said that they would try SALSA once a week if it was offered. So this was amazing for me. Now, there are some huge limitations of this study, such as I only had a handful of participants, so I cannot say with any certainty that SALSA is an effective treatment for people with psychosis or that it improves mood or anything like that. I can only say from the very limited information that I had, I think there's some promise there and maybe SALSA should be studied further. So it's important to know that even if you do research on something and you find really positive results, that doesn't mean you can generalize it to the entire world or to an entire population. And I can share more about how to interpret research in the future, so if that's something you're interested in, please comment below. But this project was an amazing experience. It allowed me to really be exposed to the ins and outs of research, coming up with the idea, securing funding, figuring out recruitment, where am I going to get these participants from, how am I going to carry out the procedure, and then working out the kinks when things go wrong, and then obtaining the results, analyzing those results using statistical analyses. So many things went into this project, and it took a really long time, and there were days that I was absolutely sick of it, and I wasn't even sure that I was going to finish or graduate on time. But in the end, it's something that I'm so, so proud of. And after the project was carried out, the writing phase kicked in. And if you want to hear more about what it's like writing a thesis, you can let me know in the comments, and I'll cover that in a future video. But this is just an example of how you can tie together your passions, your culture, and your unique perspective into research and academia. And now I'm not interested in working with people who have psychosis, and I'm not super interested in researching dance as much, but I'm interested in working with the Latinx population because I'm Latinx, and I'm interested in Spanish-speaking populations, I'm interested in trauma in that community, and this is an example of how my culture matters and my presence matters in academia. And so I just wanted to share this story with you so that you can hear if something that you're really passionate about, if something really unique about you and your identity is something that you want to study, you can do that. You can integrate it into academia. And you may not change the world with one tiny study, because my study certainly didn't change really anything. It doesn't matter. It gave me the confidence to say, I think I do want to have a career in research. I think I can apply to graduate school and see myself doing this for the rest of my career. And that's an opportunity that was huge to me, and it gave me a really weird and interesting topic to talk about on my graduate interviews. When I put that on my CV, schools were like, wait, you did a project with who doing what? And I was like, can you tell us more about that? And I was like, sure. I'm so excited to talk about that. And I hope you can see in this video that I love sharing about this because it's something super unique that I was able to do. And I'm currently working on trying to publish that paper. I hope that I can find a home for it. As we say in academia, every article has a home, meaning a journal, that will publish it. And it may not ever get published, but at least I know that I worked so, so hard on that and I made it happen even when some faculty doubted me, even when I knew that the project was really ambitious, even when I couldn't secure funding, it was something that I was really committed to, and it really changed my life. So I hope this video was helpful to you, and I really would love to hear your feedback or just what your reactions were in the comments. I also hope that you'll stay connected with me on other platforms. If you're not already following me at Grad Life Grind, you're missing out because I share so much wonderful information about what it's like in grad school, what my day-to-day life is like, and also information about applying to graduate school. So definitely check me out there, and you can also check out gradlifegrind.com, which is my website. Thank you for watching.