While taking classes and tutoring at a community college my junior and senior years of high school, I met a lot of dedicated, talented, hardworking people. Unfortunately, the community college environment often doesn’t introduce students to research opportunities and therefore many never get involved. Through programs such as Condor Techs and SIMS at UCSB, I seek to involve community college students and beginning university students in research.
Condor Techs: Category Learning in the Peripheral Visual Field
Condor Techs gives STEM students at Oxnard college the opportunity to spend two weeks on the UCSB campus in an intensive hands-on research experience. Over the course of those two weeks, my students learned the basic neuroscience behind category learning, the visual field, and how the two interact. They then successfully collected data from 17 subjects, analyzed the data, interpreted the results, and developed a future plan taking into account the results.
Summer Institute in Mathematics and Science (SIMS)
Similar to Condor Techs, SIMS is a two week program in which beginning UCSB students (prior to their first year) spend two weeks on campus taking coursework, attending lectures on professional development, and being mentored on a research project by a current graduate student.
In the two weeks I had them, my group of 4 incoming freshmen learned the background behind the project and what the Condor Techs team had discovered, successfully collected data from human subjects for a new experiment reflecting the Condor Tech results, analyzed and interpreted the results, and presented their research in a 10 minute research presentation.
UCSB ScienceLine
ScienceLine gives local K-12 students and teachers the opportunity to ask a science/research question to a researcher at UCSB. The goal of the program is to teach the students how to formulate scientific questions, get them interested in science and research, and show them that scientists care about them and are more than mythical figures wearing lab coats and plotting to take over the world.
As an answerer, I answered questions on a wide variety of topics related to neuroscience, psychology, and engineering. Examples of questions I have answered on: schizophrenia, memory loss after brain damage.