Trepidation Turns into Pride After Completing the Fearsome Capstone

 Kylie Dalessandro, Verrazzano Class of 2021, completed major in Psychology 

Upon first hearing the requirements for an honors thesis, I doubted my ability to undertake such a project. The prospect of conducting actual research and writing such a large, scholarly paper was overwhelming. Nevertheless, I decided to accept the challenge. I was surprised and honored that my PSY 352 professor asked me to help in his lab and volunteered to guide me in this process, and I’m very glad that he did because I truly learned a lot. Although I was quite intimidated at first, my mentor really did make this process smooth. I appreciated the approaches he took on everything and I am very thankful to have had such an attentive mentor.

I initiated the project during the first semester of my senior year, which was also my first time working full time during school. Because research projects are just as much centered on established literature as they are new data, I had a lot of reading to do. I felt like I had a good grasp of my own research question as well as all of the data that I was reading. In the end, I read about 20 pieces of research.  Because my mentor had me annotate the literature as I read it, writing the introduction was quite easy. This was the first piece of real writing being done for the thesis and it did take me a while to write the 12 page introduction.

At this point, I did begin to worry about time, but my mentor helped me keep things moving at a healthy pace. I felt really good about my method section because I had a good understanding of our research. We began data collection around February, which proved to be a new stressor. Postings on Reddit and Facebook did not generate participants as quickly as anticipated, which made me nervous about timing and analyzing everything. In the end, my mentor and I came up with a solution and everything worked out really well. Analyzing the results was overwhelming at first, as I had been out of statistics for a while. After talking through the analysis and brushing up on my statistics, it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

Thinking about how far I have come, not only with this project, but also in college, I am really proud. I underestimated my abilities, but now that it’s complete I feel extremely proud. I was able to write a scholarly research paper, work full time, and take another class all at the same time and it gave me a new sense of confidence. I also feel relieved to have undertaken such a project because I have learned so much that will help me in graduate school and beyond.