January 2020
My first semester at UF was full of great opportunities to get acclimated to the campus and the academic environment here. Some great courses that I took included Advanced Principles of Criminal Justice, an Uncommon Reads course about The Sound and the Fury, and Introduction to Linguistics. These courses helped me broaden my intellectual horizons and explore what my academic interests are. The URSP course Research and Creativity allowed me to hear from some prominent researchers on campus and get experience creating my own research proposal with my group, which was a great experience. I also became involved with some extracurricular groups like GRiP, where I worked to adapt video game controllers for patients at Shands Hospital and Honors Ensemble, where I was able to perform great music with other honors students. Overall, my first semester was hectic but very fun, and I greatly look forward to my future as a Gator.
September 2020
As I begin the Fall Semester of my second year here at UF, I can't help but be in awe at how much has changed. With the onset of the pandemic here in the U.S., there have been many changes in how we interact with each other and our work. With this being said, I have been so lucky to continue working on research through virtual means and being involved in student groups like the Psycholinguistics Research Group which have helped me stay in touch with current research. Additionally, I was able to attend a virtual conference and listen to some amazing research by black linguists while learning more about the social circumstances within academia that lead to exclusion. I have also been very fortunate to be able to begin designing my own online study on bilingual decision making as part of my role in the Brain, Language, and Bilingualism Lab. Overall, my goals for this year are to continue working on this research and find new ways to feel involved in the UF community even without being physically there.
November 2020
My Fall semester of my second year is coming to an end, and although I miss being on campus and interacting with my instructors and peers in-person, I am grateful that technologies exist to allow me to continue playing an active role in my classes, activities, and research. This semester has seen my small research idea on bilinguals and decision making grow to become a fully-fledged online study being conducted by a team of five researchers including myself. The night before I am writing this, I received word that the IRB had approved our study, and I am very excited to finally be able to begin testing after Thanksgiving break. It has been challenging in finding the time to balance my work on continuing to develop and expand on the survey, conduct a pilot test, and continue my classes but I have greatly enjoyed my first real foray into this amazing process of discovery and creating new knowledge. Although I look forward to eventually being able to continue doing even more research in-person when it is safe, learning to adapt and design a study online has taught me a lot about overcoming challenges and persisting.
April 2021
I have now completed the Spring semester of my sophomore year here at UF. I also completed this semester from my home through virtual classes, and I am very excited to be able to return to in-person classes beginning in August. This semester saw huge progress on my primary research project (the Bilingual Decision Making study) wherein we have tested over 130 monolingual participants from here at UF(!) and we are currently making plans to begin testing Spanish-English bilingual participants both here at UF and from the University of Granada in Spain. Despite some of the challenges that we faced (which are inevitable in research generally and even more so while working remotely on a fully online study, I am extremely proud of the work my team and I have done on this project and can't wait to see how we will be able to expand its scope and find new interesting trends to continue to contribute to the academic literature. We tested even more participants than we had set as a goal, and this was something that was a very pleasant and exciting surprise. Now, we look forward to testing other groups of participants, doing preliminary data analysis, and expanding the project in the future in other directions such as the auditory versions of the dilemmas.