Before college I had a weird connection with learning and academia. I'd never found a serious interest in it, and my skills were more based around what I picked up immediately. I had created this concept in my mind that researchers were pretentious and all full of this "natural skill" that I lacked. When I started to be involved though this was immediately pushed out of my mind; we focused on academic accessibility (which is now one of the most important things to me!) and I found a newfound importance in my "stubborn not smart" mentality.
My first research involvement where I was primarily involved in methodology discussion along with learning how to find, analyze, and critique academia. This was also where I found my interest in accessible academia; from word choice to sentence structure, flow, and formatting— all of these became just as important to me as the information that the researchers wanted to convey to the reader.
Many of the courses I've taken at Oberlin had a heavy emphasis on research which included replication studies. Of these one had a goal of fully recreating an academic piece in LaTeX. LaTeX has grown to become one of my favorite ways to work on notes, even using a variant of it with Obsidian (although typically I am working on Overleaf). Replication work also gave me the chance to go a step further with critiques I may have had on writing and formatting by working together with my group to create a more enjoyable that had a good flow & felt comfortable even for someone with 0 knowledge on a given topic.
As a retired trans athlete, the fear & stigma around us always was an incredibly important part of my desire to do research. With this, I've gone through numerous articles and adapted their successes to our future designs while also critiquing their shortcomings and attempting to work around them in future work. Current projects I'm involved in are focused on the perception of advantage for trans athletes, along with another study focusing on peoples views of athletes based on current legislation.
One of the main parts of my research experience has been using Qualtrics. Using a few online resources and basic intuition I've gotten quite comfortable with the various uses of the program along with the logic that comes with it. I will say my funniest experience was attempting to work on a study with a friend at the same time and continually overwriting eachother, although the learning curve ended up pretty easy after a while!
Research has taken heavy advantage of the "stubborn not smart" mentality I mentioned earlier— which is a good thing! One of the most memorable situations involved us searching for bias and threat mitigation strategies. I spent a good week on it and found nothing. It felt almost embarassing showing up to the meeting, yet it became comical: no one was able to find anything on this because it didn't exist. We made a few jokes and simply adjusted our plan— and that's one of the main reasons I love research. This is one of dozens of walls we'd hit, shruged off and adjusted to accordingly.
