“We do not learn from experience...
we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Dewey

The popular conception of scientific research is that is a super precise, linear process. Through my summer experience, however, I have come face-to-face with how that intuition isn't necessarily true. Science, like most pursuits in life, involves a great deal of educated guesswork. And I'm not just referring to the process of developing a hypothesis, the educated guess that is often regarded as a crucial piece to the scientific method; there is an immense amount of guesswork at every stage of the scientific process, from what questions to pursue to what methods to use. Although I conducted exhaustive background research on my topic, there was no way to know for sure if I was heading in the right direction.

This fact made the experience both intimidating and exciting. On one hand, I could never be certain that I was doing "the right thing." I couldn't check my answers in the back of the book; ultimately, it was just me and my faculty mentor trying as best as we could to determine what route was most logical or promising. Yet the exhilarating part of this project was a direct product of what made it so intimidating: we were treading on uncharted territory where "correct answers" simply didn't exist. We were responsible for the creation of knowledge.

With such a dearth of certainty and absolutes, I had an immense amount of freedom in what I could do to produce my research. That freedom became one of the greatest challenges I had to face. I had 8 weeks during the summer to basically do whatever I wanted. I was responsible for figuring out what question to pursue, how to pursue it, what my goals were, and what my deadlines were going to be. Every aspect of this project, except for the end date of the program, was essentially a matter of my discretion. My faculty mentor was certainly a huge help when it came to charting my course, but I was ultimately the one who had to push my project forward. It was my project, and therefore, my responsibility. This made it important to set limits for myself. Once I traveled down the rabbit hole that is scientific research, I found that there was an immense amount of existing literature to review, and that I could spend weeks deliberating important decisions about the direction I wanted to take my project. I could have spent the rest of my life studying the literature and contemplating an experimental design, but I found that eventually I had to pick a direction and pursue it. It might not be perfect, but there was no way to anticipate what perfection was. That was the nature of my research: taking very thoughtful shots in the dark. I found that some questions cannot be answered with pure thought power, and some decisions just had to be made in the moment. For instance, I could not anticipate the issues I would encounter with our technology until I started working with it. There were challenges with creating my stimulus video that I could not anticipate until I began shooting it. And of course, there was no way of answering my experimental question without trying to put forth the best experiment I could possibly muster, imperfect though it may prove to be.

Despite the obstacles that my summer experience threw at me, I could still lay claim to a few accomplishments. In fact, I was able to accomplish all my goals for the summer, and then some. My initial goals included settling on a hypothesis and methodology, creating a literature review, submitting an IRB proposal, producing a stimulus, and running pilot experiments. I was able to accomplish all those goals, and in addition, I was able to create an experimental protocol and secure IRB approval before the start of the semester. On top of that, I was invited to deliver a TED talk about my research at Ithaca College's 2017 TEDx event. For more information about my project accomplishments, please see the project outcomes section.

At the beginning of my Summer Scholars experience, I was taking an online statistics class while I was working on my research. In addition to educating me about concepts important to conducting research like methods of determining statistical significance, this statistics class provided an intellectual reprieve from my research for a few days of every week. However, outside of this class, my research was pretty much all-consuming. From the moment I got up until the moment I went to bed, I was working on my research. I would take short breaks to exercise and take care of basic necessities such as cooking and shopping, but in large part, I was working. 

The all-encompassing nature of my research project became even more complete once my online class ended. The completion of my class meant I could fully devote my time to my research. For the most part, this meant a lot of time alone with my computer. For the first 4 weeks of the project, I was mostly reading studies, taking notes, and formulating plans for my research methodology. It was a very solitary existence consisting of a lot of reading, writing, and pondering. After my faculty mentor and I had decided on a methodology, however, I was able to transition into more "hands-on" type of work. This first took the form of producing my video. I had to essentially be my own producer, director, cinematographer, lighting technician, and editor. As I finished up my film, I was able to begin learning the data recording technology I was going to employ in the study. Some other Ithaca College students helped me learn how to use Ithaca College's functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) brain imaging equipment. As I attempted to master this system, my faculty mentor taught me how to use the school's eye tracking technology. We faced several setbacks during the teaching process. For the first few days, we had trouble getting the software to open. Then, once we got it to open, we had trouble getting our camera to turn on. It seemed like we were encountering a new issue at every stage of the process that would stymie us for at least 24 hours (that was how long it took for us to hear back from our technical support contacts in Germany). Of course, there were some problems that we simply could not rely on technical support to solve for us, so we often had to find creative solutions on our own. 

Once we finally got the system to work properly, learning to operate the equipment proved to be rather simple. I then proceeded to conduct pilot studies (i.e. dry runs of my experiment). These studies allowed me to practice using the equipment and gave me a chance to test different approaches to my experimental protocol. For instance, I toyed with the idea of using a reaction-time assay, but I found through my pilot studies that this approach was impractical.

During the final two weeks of my research, I was back at my computer again, hammering out my Institutional Review Board proposal, literature review, and a write-up of my experimental protocol. It was basically a mad dash to the finish at that point, as I was determined to complete all the items on my to-do list before I left for the summer.

For my structured reflection activity, my mentor instructed me to create a journal entry every week to record my thoughts about my experience. She also provided me with a small notebook where I could record these thoughts, as well as ideas or questions pertaining to the direction of my project. In doing my structured reflections, I could keep the big picture in mind while I dug deeper and deeper into the specifics of what I was investigating. This activity forced me to gauge my emotions as I worked on my research, and to keep in mind how these emotions related to what I wanted to do with my life.

The general practice of reflecting on my research also allowed me to evaluate what I was doing effectively or ineffectively. For instance, from looking back on how I approached my work, I learned that I need to provide some structured limits for myself to work effectively and efficiently. I learned that it was not always healthy for me to work on my research all day. Such a work schedule would give me the illusion of having an overabundance of time, an illusion that would allow my mind to wander. This would cause me to take more time than was necessary on the tasks I had to complete. Sometimes, it was better to set aside a limited portion of the day to work on research. This caused me to feel just slightly more pressure to get my work done each day, allowing me to focus more intensely on the task at hand and waste less time.

Another benefit of reflection was an enhanced ability to create self-imposed deadlines, and stick to them. In the past, I have had no issue with creating and adhering to deadlines for group projects that I worked on, or deadlines that I had been given by higher authorities. For personal projects, however, I tend to use up all the time that is allotted to me, often deliberating over even the smallest details to the last possible second. Through reflecting back on my research experience, I have come to recognize how exhausting this over-attention to details can be, and how sometimes it can hurt rather than help by causing me to focus on minutia when I could be moving on to other tasks. This was an emotional realization more so than an intellectual one, and has allowed me to start to override the perfectionist impulses that prevent me from using my time efficiently.

The relationship I had with my mentor was very different from the relationship I typically have with my professors. In a typical classroom, the professor usually delivers information from on high. While many of the professors I have had at Ithaca College try to break down this dynamic into something more humble and personable, at the end of the day, they are still the experts upon whom students rely to provide information and guidance. The professor teaches me the concept and skills I need to know, establishes deadlines, objectives, readings, and frames the discourse of the entire learning experience. My relationship with my mentor did not look much like a student-professor dynamic so much as a relationship between colleagues, between fellow researchers with a mutual interest in the same project. Make no mistake, I was often very reliant on my mentor to teach me data collection techniques or provide me with advice about how to develop my methodology. However, just as I relied on her professional opinions and expertise, she often deferred to my opinions and expertise. After all, I was the primary researcher for this project. As such, I was the one who had done a majority of the background research on my topic, and also went out on my own to learn how to use the brain imaging technology we wanted to employ as well as a blink-rate essay for evaluating cognitive workload.

For much of my college career, I have believed that I wanted to earn a PhD in neuroscience or cognitive psychology and conduct research for a living. This summer research experience has given me the opportunity to test that theory. I discovered that I really valued interfacing with other people during my work. The work I was doing could be lonely and monotonous; I could sometimes go an entire week without having a face-to-face conversation with another person. This isolation highlighted the value of having regular human interaction integrated into my work. This is one of many factors that is causing me to consider exploring the clinical applications of my interest in neuroscience and psychology as I look into future career paths.

This research experience did corroborate some of my suspicions, however. Mainly, it helped confirm my interest in neuroscience and cognitive studies. The experience of working with brain imaging equipment was particularly thrilling. It was exactly the sort of opportunity that I had been looking forward to for years. I also enjoy thinking about thinking, which was largely what I did this summer. Thus, my Summer Scholars experience provided more evidence that a job that involves studying the mind and brain would be an appropriate career for me.