I am a psychology major, film major, and neuroscience and chemistry double minor. I am also a member of the Honors program at Ithaca College. As a lab assistant in Cornell University’s Cutting Laboratory, I assisted with cataloguing data pertaining to the formal properties of commercial films for Professor James Cutting’s psychological research. I was also awarded $2,600 by the State of Ohio for creating a research, development, and commercialization plan for a smartphone application designed to assist dyslexic individuals with reading printed material. These experiences introduced me to the rigorous processes of planning research, conducting background studies, and collecting and analyzing data.

As a Psychology major and Neuroscience minor, I have taken several courses in general psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, statistics, and cognition. These courses reviewed processes and phenomena surrounding sensation, perception, and cognition, as well as relevant psychological studies and concepts in research methodology, design, and statistical analysis.

I have also taken a variety of classes that deal with the production and theory of film. The knowledge I have gained from production classes helped me prepare video clips for this study and have informed my scholarly analyses of how films function. Through my film theory classes, I have produced a research paper entitled “Warped Space-Time: Exploiting Schematic Assumptions in ‘Ritual in Transfigured Time.’” This paper, which won the Park School Student Writing Award, utilizes psychological theories to analyze continuity editing practices in an avant-garde film. This paper was presented at the 2017 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Undergraduate Conference, the world’s most prestigious undergraduate media studies conference, and will be published in the journal Film Matters, the preeminent undergraduate academic journal of film. I will also be presenting on this research at the 2017 TEDxIthacaCollege conference.