Week 10
*cries* Well, this is it, it's already somehow the last week of the summer...
Helen and I have been making our final push to finish the school reports! We had another big group meeting, and we came away with the final changes to make. I finished all the charts, fixed a few things with the open-ended responses, fixed the PEARS instrument document, and the flow chart handouts. Helen and I are absolutely, positively determined to get them sent out before I leave next week!
I also worked on some more pre-PEACHES analysis, finishing the gender analysis and the Stanford student vs. Mechanical Turk analysis. I found a few very interesting things. I did gender as a whole, and then also split it and looked for gender differences among each population. I found that some of the overall gender differences were actually only present among the Mechanical Turk population, such as women being less interested in being a high-level technical manager or women being less narcissistic. Women also tend to be less risky, though the differences are more pronounces for the MechTurk group, with the strange exception of Stanford women being more likely to move away fom extended family. Other differences showed up when simply comparing Stanford students to the general population. I found that Stanford students have less confidence in their abilities to do entrepreneurial related tasks and they are more recreationally risky, while the MechTurks are more financially risky. However, the most interesting thing I found was that there was not any difference in overall narcissism between the two populations, but there are significant differences on certain items. Stanford students were higher on believing they are capable and thinking they know what they are doing, while MechTurk was higher on believing they are a special or extraordinary person and having authority over people. I find this fascinating because it goes against what I would have predicted. First of all, I think every Stanford student has had some leadership experiene (it's stressed pretty heavily on college applications), and I think as a whole, we are considered leaders. So, discovering that the general population likes having authority over people more than Stanford studenst was interesting. And I also feel like everyone else thinks we are special just for being Stanford students, so it was interesting that in general, we don't think we're special or extraordinary, but the people out in the general population believe they are more so. It just seemed counterintuitive, but also gave me pride in being a Stanford student. I'm glad we were not way higher in thinking we are extraordinary people; it shows we are more humble than that.
I then took all this information and put it on my poster for our end-of-the-summer poster session. I got some great feedback on my poster last week, so I edited it and then added the new PEACHES findings.
Finally, I worked more on the ABET outcomes thinking. I got to see the chart of how Stanford maps classes to the ABET outcomes, and write up my thoughts about it. There were a few that I really disagreed with, and it is interesting to really see how different my interpretation as a student of the outcomes is, and what I feel like I am getting from a class (or not getting). There are also a few classes that I don't disagree that it teaches me an outcome, but I can point to other outside examples that are much stronger and more meaningful, so looking at ABET in the context of my whole life is very different than just my engineering classes. I enjoy being able to share my thoughts on this matter! It is also helpful because they are currently working with ABET on these outcomes, so they enjoy picking my brain about it and really being able to understand a student's perspective.
Even though tomorrow is technically my last day of work, I'm not going anywhere! I will be working on and submitting an abstract to ASEE about the differences between the four PEARS schools, which should be interesting! And then I will be staying with the group, continuing work on Epicenter (since we have actually narrowed it down to two research questions, we will be getting into a new research project!). And whatever else may come up!! I'm honored to be part of this amazing team, and it's been an awesome summer.
In honor of that, the main fun thing I did this past week was paint. I painted a bowl of fruit for the lab, but it's not *just* a bowl of fruit - it's the lab's fruit! It's a bowl of APPLES, PEARS, and PEACHES!! You can see the PEARS logo fruit, the APPLES logo fruit, and then, well, PEACHES doesn't have a logo yet, so I made one up.
